Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
austin-cheney 1 hours ago [-]
If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US. As an American I wouldn't want to live next to or do business with a serial murderer. I certainly wouldn't want them coaching my kids sports or other community involvement.
an0malous 1 hours ago [-]
> If video evidence indicates IDF personnel committing these crimes also happen to be US citizens I wonder if those people could face criminal prosecution in the US.
I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.
s5300 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
snypher 1 hours ago [-]
“I mean, what was so important about that corpse?”
Animals. To think we pay for and support this.
throwawayheui57 3 hours ago [-]
Iranian here! I wish freedom for the people of Gaza and an end to their suffering and oppression. Down with all the dictators and oppressors. Be it IRGC or IDF.
yosamino 1 hours ago [-]
Hello friend.
From Palestine I want to send you all the best wishes for freedom in Iran. It's time.
And to my Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings in general I want to send a wish for for freedom and end of this stupid hatred..
There is not actually a good reason for all this violence.
IncreasePosts 2 hours ago [-]
What happens when people highly support the very group that is causing their suffering and oppression?
mikestorrent 1 hours ago [-]
There's no need to bring Republicans into this
xg15 57 minutes ago [-]
"Stop hitting yourself", good old bully logic
proxysna 3 hours ago [-]
Exceptional report. Surprised to see that much of a confusion on HN about why it is there. MH17 posts with forensics did not seem to be offtopic when they were posted. This fits.
There is an alternate World Peace Force that just got started recently because I believe, as regimes change, the UN will audit what happened. The issue is there will now be another international body that will argue the other way. It’s not exactly 3d chess, but, it is chess. Purchase of US TikTok (chess moves).
an0malous 1 hours ago [-]
Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
TacticalCoder 14 minutes ago [-]
> Don’t forget the “all they have to do is return the hostages” line
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
ignoramous 5 hours ago [-]
> All the hospitals are now rubble
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Israel did not have a habit of drastically overstating their case and quietly walking it back after they end up killing more journalists and toddlers than active combatants in hospital bombings. Also if reports didn't deliberately conflate 'armed man' with 'Hamas militant' and euphemize about the 'Hamas-run Interior Ministry' like that one does.
HappyPanacea 4 hours ago [-]
A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> Israeli forces dressed in doctors’ scrubs and women’s clothes have killed three Palestinian militants in an undercover operation in a hospital in the occupied West Bank city of Jenin.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
HappyPanacea 4 hours ago [-]
Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad? because it led to death of civilians who had no part in the fight; pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue. Although assassinating a patient is also not kosher it less relevant to the discussion about use of uniforms.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> pretending to be your enemy's civilians bring no such issue
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
HappyPanacea 3 hours ago [-]
> Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
The spirit of the law is reducing the civilian cost of war. Its hard to argue that Israel's few incidents of wearing civilian clothes for special operations increased the odds of civilian costs compared to the same operation done in uniform. Meanwhile, Hamas's lack of uniforms has led to significantly increased civilian cost.
LorenPechtel 3 hours ago [-]
Yeah, Israel has done some infiltration like that. Not proper, but you're pointing out a molehill while ignoring the mountain.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
When the molehill is a war crime, sure.
anderber 2 hours ago [-]
So is the mountain, though
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
Yes. You will not find me defending Hamas war crimes, of which there are many too.
cess11 4 hours ago [-]
The israelis must stop the occupation regardless of whether the al-Qassam brigades wear uniform or not.
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
LorenPechtel 3 hours ago [-]
Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> Drastically overstating their case? Israel estimates tend to be pretty close to accurate. What's been walked back?
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
cholantesh 1 hours ago [-]
>"Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.
glenstein 4 hours ago [-]
Not sure I understand the mass downvotes on this one. I didn't take it as endorsing the action but summarizing the rationale.
dathinab 12 minutes ago [-]
many somewhat intellectual(1), but evil(2), people love to play make pretend of just "summarizing the rational", "playing devil advocate", "just pointing out facts" to endorse their word view while having "plausible deniability" if caught (as they tend to know many people think their ideas are evil).
Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.
This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.
But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.
---
(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.
(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
mikkupikku 4 hours ago [-]
People have had good reasons for downvoting the above, but it's unclear how many and what those reasons might be.
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
The reason is that it's false. All hospitals are not rubble.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
weird_tentacles 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
It's not at all an uncommon scenario to have to deal with in war, especially asymmetrical conflicts.
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
weird_tentacles 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
dang 4 hours ago [-]
We've banned this account for breaking the site guidelines. You can't attack others like this here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
wk_end 4 hours ago [-]
> The rules aren't written by plucky revolutionaries, but the big powers. They, thus, fairly often favor people who fight like the big powers.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
eirini1 3 hours ago [-]
> While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
wk_end 3 hours ago [-]
Let's suppose it could be demonstrated conclusively that every hospital in Gaza that Israel has bombed had Hamas militants operating out of them, as Israel has claimed. Do you think that'd silence Israel's critics about bombing hospitals? Do you think it should?
worik 9 minutes ago [-]
> Do you think it should?
No.
This is asymmetrical warfare
The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
throwaway3060 3 hours ago [-]
If that was true, then why does it seem this conflict has gotten much more attention than the Russia-Ukraine war, which is on a much larger scale?
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
The power imbalance probably plays a role.
Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.
(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)
magic_hamster 1 hours ago [-]
The only country out of the four mentioned who was given a donation of arms is Ukraine.
War is always terrible and a mess. The problem is that the intention is, very clearly, ethic cleansing. And that, is, not in accordance to international law. That's the reason they target humanitarian workers and journalist. And the reason they block things like baby formula from entering Gaza. Because the worst are the living conditions to the population, the better.
If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.
By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:
Those are weasel words. The correct, honest word, is genocide
magic_hamster 1 hours ago [-]
> This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.
ebbi 5 hours ago [-]
Steven Sinofsky (ex Microsoft, and was also in the Epstein leaks), has been running cover for the IDF for the last few years. One tweet that comes to mind where he alluded that just because a building may have a few first aid kits, it's not a hospital.
themafia 4 hours ago [-]
> according to accepted conventions
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
expedition32 4 hours ago [-]
It's pretty clear that Israel is ethnically cleansing so that they can live in a pure Jewish state.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
It should be reminding you of something which happened a few decades earlier and was much, much worse than Serbia.
scarecrowbob 3 hours ago [-]
As a person living on the border between New Mexico and Colorado on land that borders reservations and who drives past the site of a residential school pretty regularly, I completely agree.
There are modern European states refounded after the Allies pursued a deliberate and calculated policy of ethnic cleansing to ensure Germans would never be a problem again - in some cases going from 25% of the population prewar to 1% afterwards, with mass violence and rape included. Ethnic cleansing is only really frowned upon when you lose, or when you win so hard it's a convenient virtue signal and disapproval doesn't threaten the status quo.
wedog6 1 hours ago [-]
Come on, that's not an accurate depiction of what happened to ethnic Germans in Eastern Europe. It is the neo-Nazi party line though.
Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. The Czechoslovak President literally called it the "final solution" to their German problem. Or do you just want more examples? There are plenty.
computerthings 2 hours ago [-]
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blell 2 hours ago [-]
If Serbs wanted their own ethnostate they should have spent the last century subverting the structures of power and media of the West. They didn't do that and the civilians of Beograd paid the price.
Muromec 3 hours ago [-]
Serbia wasn’t on a good terms with Big Genocide lobby
pjc50 3 hours ago [-]
Even so, there have been all sorts of contrarians trying to defend them. Usually for weird anti NATO reasons.
_factor 3 minutes ago [-]
The history points to the US and allies destabilizing the region after the power vacuum left by Tito’s death. I’m sure the number of oil pipelines running through from Turkey had nothing to do with the narrative or arming of the KLA.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
I can’t believe I’m actually writing this: parent is an underrated comment.
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mhb 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know why you're using the past tense here, I was still trying to talk some sense into these people barely two days ago. It's hopeless at this point.
netsharc 4 hours ago [-]
If you have 3 hours, there's a documentary you can watch, about a man who was sanctioned by the government to kill a lot of "communists" in 1960's Indonesia: The Act of Killing (available at e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TDeEObjR9Q ).
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
idop 4 hours ago [-]
1. Says the IDF accepted the fictitious 0-militants 100%-civilian death toll claim.
2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.
3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.
4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.
5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.
The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
1. No, it doesn't.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
idop 3 hours ago [-]
Where is the source? Show me the actual source. Showing me that one news agency is reporting that another news agency reported something, with no way to verify anything in that chain, does and proves nothing. It's a claim with no backing.
The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data".
Officially, Israel has no nuclear weapons. (lol)
idop 3 hours ago [-]
At the end of the day, you made a conscious choice to accept the claim that the IDF confirmed the death toll as truth, and to spread it online as such, despite not having any actual proof. That was Hamas strategy since 0day, long before Israel even managed to clear the last Hamas terrorist from its borders after the attack: just make anti-Israel claims. Just make them. Everybody will accept them, no questions asked.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
At the end of the day, I make the conscious choice to trust three different Israeli news outlets, CNN, the fact that the IDF isn't offering a different estimate, and satellite photos of the destruction in Gaza.
The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.
vibeprofessor 56 minutes ago [-]
yes, 70,000 Gazans, 50k of whom were males of fighting age, no other army managed to achieve such low civilian-to militants casualties ratio, under such extreme war conditions
grumple 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> There was a seperate hospital that the IDF did bomb…
Lack of fuel doesn't mean it was bombed or destroyed.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
slg 3 hours ago [-]
Israel's response was very similar to the US's response to 9/11. 3,000 Americans were killed by terrorists (a smaller percentage of the population than Israelis killed on 10/7) and as a response the US started two wars killing at least 100 times as many Afghans and Iraqis (there are lots of debates about the total casualties there too just like Gaza). This is not a defense of Israel, just a fact that seemingly is never part of the conversation that I think can help people better understand why this is happening.
LightBug1 2 hours ago [-]
Tens of millions protested the US response.
Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.
You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.
Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".
slg 49 minutes ago [-]
I genuinely don't know what distinction you're trying to make here. Do you think there aren't equivalent protests in Israel? There were minorities in both countries that opposed these responses from the beginning and those responses generally became more unpopular as time went on just like the men who spearheaded them, but a majority of both countries were initially supportive.
abdelhousni 3 hours ago [-]
You forgot eighty years of occupation, cultural , economical and ethnical cleansing of the local indigenous people called Palestinians with help of US and Western countries mainly.
slg 2 hours ago [-]
>the local indigenous people called Palestinians
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.
echoangle 1 hours ago [-]
> implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous.
Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.
echoangle 45 minutes ago [-]
But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other? They might all come from the same people that came to Australia first, but that doesn’t mean they are native to the place they currently live in. If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe, who gets the land now? And how do you settle that without some arbitrary statute of limitations?
defrost 36 minutes ago [-]
> But surely, the different tribes in Australia also moved around and replaced each other?
Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".
The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.
The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.
"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.
> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe
Do you have any evidence of that?
> who gets the land now?
There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.
If you take the view of history that the ability to forcibly drive other people off their land grants the new inhabitants a valid claim to that land, then Israel's actions are only objectionable because they are happening now rather than in the history books. It's inherently a doctrine of might is right, and the Israelis are mightier than the Palestinians at this current moment in history.
echoangle 42 minutes ago [-]
Right, but at least historically, what alternative is there? You can’t really unroll thousands of years of human history and make everyone go back to where their ancestors came from (even just because people ended up mixing after colonizing other places), so you have to take some state as the correct one and then condemn every change after that (or just let everyone do whatever they want).
Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?
slg 34 minutes ago [-]
Which is exactly why this area has been in conflict for millennia. Many different groups have valid claims to the area being their historic homeland. Dubbing one single group as "indigenous" is a refutation of all the other people's historical claims on that land and it means all the Israelis have to do is wait out this conflict until it becomes "history" and the Palestinians lose that "indigenous" label.
pojzon 1 hours ago [-]
This will be the case tho.
US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.
throwaway27448 1 hours ago [-]
You can call hamas whatever you'd like, but it's certainly not hamas doing most of the terrorizing in palestine....
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
I am entirely behind this take.
bdhe 3 hours ago [-]
> and it quickly grew beyond any reason
Why did it quickly grow?
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
Because of literally years of terrorist acts from Hamas? Because the action initially had overwhelming public support? Because, as any military action without proper planning, they promised a quick victory and had no plans beyond "bomb, bomb, bomb"? And had no plans for "what do we do if we don't succeed"?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
baq 3 hours ago [-]
Consider the possibility that “bomb bomb bomb” was the entire and only point of the exercise.
sophacles 3 hours ago [-]
Because there were children to starve. Brown children.
TheOtherHobbes 2 hours ago [-]
Hamas is a terror organisation funded, and quite possibly created, by far-right nationalist elements in the Israeli government to weaken the Palestinian authority and create a pretext for the occupation of Gaza.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
tartoran 2 hours ago [-]
We should stop using this term terror/terrorist, it's lost any meaning. If Hamas are terrorists because they're terrorizing Israeli population then so are Israelis' IDF or whatever force kills other country's population. And the list extends beyond that. To paint a resisting force/army as terrorists is just charged language to emotionally manipulate and pollute discourse. It would be more useful to put in balance what each side is fighting for.
km3r 1 hours ago [-]
Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.
Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.
Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.
tartoran 29 minutes ago [-]
> Terrorism has a simple definition: using force against civilian life to further ones goals.
Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.
Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.
km3r 9 minutes ago [-]
What political/ideological goal does attacking the aid workers move forward? It's a war crime, no doubt, but terrorism has a meaning that doesn't include all war crimes.
> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.
The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
You didn't actually address the actual point. Israel and it's defenders have been lying about the death toll this entire time and Hamas was not.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
yosamino 2 hours ago [-]
here you go:
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
The evidence that their numbers were accurate was just presented to you in this very thread.
cholantesh 3 hours ago [-]
I take it that literally every NGO in this space and genocide scholars are all in on the lie?
baq 3 hours ago [-]
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning,
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
Yes. You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> You can't blow up entire hospitals and kill patients just because someone's storing stuff in the basement
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
"Much of" and "all of" are very different things.
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
I don't know how much weight the legalist argument holds here, seeing how the IDF has been acting extra-legally for a long while now, but anyway, I seriously doubt that each destroyed hospital and each destroyed school held terrorists. We've seen the IDF target civilians, aid workers and journalists too many times to believe them so easily.
user____name 3 hours ago [-]
This is a common excuse, but The Truth is Israel doesn't care they're housing anything in the basement, they'll bomb it anyway. The ethnic cleansing agenda is plainly obvious at this point. In fact they seem to prefer having Hamas in predictable places, easier to take out and a convenient excuse to cull a few hundred of a superfluous population -- the Palestinian birth rate is way above that of Israelis. The operational reality is that Hamas is simply the best advertisement for the political hacks in charge of Israel, the system perpetuates itself because the current situation provides leverage for both ruling parties. And it turns out when you have two antagonistic death cults, people die. Solution: don't get born a Palestinian in Israel? Depressing.
bamboozled 4 hours ago [-]
I don’t like it but it was a war. October 7 was a declaration of war. I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror” and I’m sure similar collateral occurred.
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
crystal_revenge 3 hours ago [-]
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.
As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
The war on terror, it might have been criticized in hindsight, but let's not pretend it was unpopular at the beginning...
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
So yeah, I'm sure many people in Israel have a complicated view of the events that happened post October 7 too. Yet people will mostly ignore all of that and go completely out of their way to criticize basically everything Israel has done.
I'm quite partial to it all, I just hate the hypocrisy.
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> I don’t like it but it was a war.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very hard.
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
I saw Israel using very precision weapons too. Warning people to leave areas etc. I even saw "live leak" style videos where people in Gaza were filming buildings because they knew precisely when they'd be demolished.
None of that was good enough though, clearly...war sucks, best to avoid starting one in the first place if you care about the welfare of others...people can say the IDF did all the wrong things, and you could also say it was stupidly reckless of Hamas.
For those people who are really unhappy with the IDF, also need to be eqaually unhappy with Hamas, else nothing will improve for the innocent people of the region.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> I saw Israel using very precision weapons too.
I would suggest that fairly indiscriminate use of precision weapons isn't quite what I'm referring to.
vibeprofessor 4 hours ago [-]
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LorenPechtel 3 hours ago [-]
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idiotsecant 3 hours ago [-]
You saw pictures of a hospital.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago [-]
Pictures of a basically untouched hospital. The destruction is way overstated.
And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.
idiotsecant 2 hours ago [-]
You might be the only person on the Internet still inexplicably defending the Israeli government on this.
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago [-]
It was "reported that", doesn't make it so. And note that one of the reasons noted was "lack of fuel". Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.
Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.
And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.
Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.
Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> Gaza never ran out of fuel, it was an artificial shortage caused by Hamas.
The red/blue emergency lights (and headlights) are visibly illuminated in the video.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
You cannot quote Wikipedia on any topic (Wikipedia policy - cite the source, not Wikipedia) but especially matters to do with Hamas/Israel war. Even Jimmy Wales has noted severe issues with bias.
And what is the relevance here? That's talking about prisoners of war, not talking about military use of "civilian" things.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
Are POWs civilians?
Again, the claim upthread: "All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things..."
Accurate, or not?
joyeuse6701 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
esalman 2 hours ago [-]
In general Muslims are not out to exterminate Jews. Jews are "people of the book". They are followers of Moses who is one of the most revered prophets in Islam. Jews are brothers and sisters and it is even permitted to marry them.
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians…
> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…
Sleight of hand happening here.
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
There's no sleight of hand, just a horrifying reality. It's not just Hamas and Hezbollah. Civilians from Gaza participated in October 7 and poll after poll shows broad palestinian support for the destruction of Israel.
Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
prmoustache 1 hours ago [-]
That is kind of a dishonnest take. You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades.
You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas.
You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.
richardfeynman 1 hours ago [-]
You wrote:
"You make sure to avoid mentionning that hamas is not only a terrorist organization. It is also an administrative body which has been bringing employment and services to a significant portion of the palestinian population while they have been constantly under strict embargoes, restriction and aggressions for decades."
This sounds like:
"You make sure to avoid mentioning that the Nazis are not just a genocidal army of aggression, intent on genociding Jews and taking over Europe. They are also an administrative body that bla bla bla"
I wasn't simply saying that there was broad support for Hamas among gazan civilians, I was saying there was broad support for the destruction of Israel and the crimes against humanity that Hamas, along with a broad contingent of Gazan civilians, perpetrated on civilians on October 7.
prmoustache 34 minutes ago [-]
So that excuse perpetuating a much bigger crime and killing thousands of kids who never had their say. Rrrriiight.
What Israel government and IDF has been doing is an insult to the shoah victims. Any half decent jew should condemn the likoud.
richardfeynman 26 minutes ago [-]
I dispute your claim on genocide and the purposeful killing of kids. so the only impact your words have on me is that I see you inventing crimes
My grandmother is a living Auschwitz survivor (one of the last, she's nearly 100). I'll let her decide what she thinks is an insult to Shoah victims.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
And would Israeli polling about Palestinians justify their deaths, too?
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
Nobody is justifying Palestinian deaths, whatever that means. You don't know my position on the war, since I haven't articulated it here.
I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
tartoran 2 hours ago [-]
> I’m not sure why the Palestinians and allies are complaining. Their stated aim is the genocide of Jews and the destruction of Israel. That’s Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Yemen. And they’ve tried but are too incompetent to succeed.
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
joyeuse6701 52 minutes ago [-]
I feel like there were a few one sided wars we’re forgetting about… This is also a strange advocacy for British or Ottoman rule. Maybe you’re right, if the Israelies acted like their colonial forebears there would be less violence.
tartoran 8 minutes ago [-]
I think they could have done better but their interest is to drag it on and slowly take over the hole area (at whatever cost because somebody else pays) . Revisit who Yitzak Rabin was, who killed him and why. I'm so sick of financing this garbage through our taxes. I want our tax dollars to help out my nation not waste it on wars and enrich some psychopaths. If there was peace there we would be no need to create an Epstein though I admit I may be too naive in believing that.
zardo 2 hours ago [-]
The old, they had it coming defence of genocide.
joyeuse6701 56 minutes ago [-]
If you play with fire you might get burned.
Hamas and friends understand this and rely on western morality to protect them from complete annihilation. They may have miscalculated how often you could kick the dog before it bit back.
This, of course, cuts both ways.
mdni007 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
george916a 2 hours ago [-]
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ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> Haaretz is not an official Israeli newspaper, certainly not an IDF one.
> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.
Yes, this is not allowed.
The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
> By contrast, Israel has not dropped an aerial bomb on any hospital building in Gaza.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, it's specific. It's also a fact that is in direct contradistinction to the OP's claim.
Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
Again:
> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
richardfeynman 1 hours ago [-]
Yes, I can elaborate. I'm not quibbling with you about whether Israel has been firing missiles at hospital buildings versus dropping glide bombs on them. I'm disputing the very foundation of your argument. You claim that Israel has "destroyed hospitals." It has not. This is a fact, little-known but true, and easily verifiable by simply trying to find a destroyed hospital (you won't be able to). What Israel has done, in rare and isolated instances, is fired tank shells at areas of hospitals with Hamas militants.
I don't blame you for making these mistakes, as the information space is poisoned, but if you're interested in being correct rather than ideological you owe it to yourself to (at bare minimum) show me (and yourself) which Gaza hospital has been reduced to rubble.
In terms of "sappers" it is true that Israel has sent special forces into hospitals with confirmed Hamas presence, but that is very different from "bombing and leveling hospitals," an alluring but ultimately false claim.
This is all occurring against a backdrop in which Hamas has weaponized hospitals. For example, they brought Israeli hostages to Gaza hospitals. They have killed an Israeli hostage in a Gaza hospital (and sent video to the family of the slain hostage). They have built tunnels under hospitals. They shoot from hospitals. They meet in hospitals. etc.
basilgohar 2 hours ago [-]
Israel is an oppressive, genocidal, apartheid illegally occupying force. You can't compare the two sides.
Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
A word salad of false claims.
ok123456 2 hours ago [-]
Hamas didn't "weaponize every hospital in Gaza."
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
Finally, a refutable claim. Can you name me a hospital in Gaza that didn't have a Hamas presence?
ok123456 2 hours ago [-]
Can you name me any official in the Israeli government who isn't lying?
richardfeynman 2 hours ago [-]
I see you won't do it. Conversation over.
If you make claims, you should be able to back them up.
ok123456 1 hours ago [-]
I see you won't do it. Conversation over.
Stop defending the murder of children in hospitals.
Stop denying a genocide.
richardfeynman 1 hours ago [-]
The only genocide that has occurred is in the area of critical thinking and epistemic standards by the antizionist crowd.
You wish there were an actual genocide, because you care more about portraying Israel as evil than you do the lives of Palestinian civilians. This is why you make one up. But good news for you: you've been infected by a curable mind virus, what the physicist David Deutsch calls "The Pattern."
tt_dev 13 hours ago [-]
> The Israeli soldiers remained on the sandbank while firing continuously at the aid workers for four minutes.
Damn…
likiiio 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
iberator 3 hours ago [-]
My stance is Mossad reading:
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
throw310822 2 hours ago [-]
> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
pojzon 1 hours ago [-]
When you know what father of Israel did during WW2 to fund the current Israel.
Uhg, too bad its not taught in school coz history is written by winners and you have to search for it yourself.
But following their conclusion: the thing that makes you a country is being recognized as one by other countries. Most of the world recognizes Palestine as a country (including 157 UN member states). Here is a map where the green countries recognize Palestine, and grey do not: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Palestin...
xg15 36 minutes ago [-]
What are the Palestinians then?
hsuduebc2 1 hours ago [-]
Many countries disagree with that. However, virtually everyone agree that it is not Israeli territory.
meenxo 1 hours ago [-]
oh nice, you are making us all sob with those tough words
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
> Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
aucisson_masque 2 hours ago [-]
Well they still have the full support of the usa government, and I'm pretty sure that even democrats would still keep supporting Israel.
So what did they really lost? Do they even care that some Europeans don't like them ? Europeans are not the one who sell them 99% of their weapons.
basilgohar 2 hours ago [-]
Europe is extremely important to Israel. Their legitimacy stems from seeing themselves as European. Their loss of support from Europe is very bad in the long term.
Yes, US is supporting them to. They are losing from both sides, though. They may have part of the remaining generation in power and that's it.
jmward01 1 hours ago [-]
The US is no longer a reliable partner. Once the current administration is gone the likelihood of US support is less than guaranteed. Even with this administration in place support is less than guaranteed. All it takes is the right moment to set off a tantrum and friends become enemies. Israel really doesn't have allies so much as accomplices and that type of friend only sticks around when it helps them.
LightBug1 1 hours ago [-]
It's notable that the US right wing have turned against Israel.
Witness Tucker Carlson dismantling Huckabee, and Zionist ideology, recently.
Where it ends up, no one knows. But this is different.
phatfish 41 minutes ago [-]
Trump is as far right as you can go and still support Israel. If America goes further to Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes land Jews will wonder why they let so much evil be done in their name by the Israeli government.
irishcoffee 2 hours ago [-]
I’m not sure most non-Europeans care what Europeans think about them. :)
throwaway27448 1 hours ago [-]
Now that the world has knowingly seen a genocide and done virtually nothing, and that the US continues to openly support Israel, I think this was a massive victory for Israel.
micromacrofoot 2 hours ago [-]
Most people in Gaza now aren't old enough to have voted for Hamas. Median age is estimated to be under 20.
neoromantique 3 hours ago [-]
What in actuality was happening long-term is the increasing integration and cooperation of Gazans with Israel, reduction of tensions and hopes for eventual peace. Which is an existencial threat to Hamas.
jeromegv 2 hours ago [-]
Is that the same cooperation seen in the West Bank where Israel keeps sending settlers and make Palestine land smaller and smaller every single year?
I highly recommend to watch the Oscar winning movie “no other land”, for anyone that thinks that Israel would just let them leave in peace
neoromantique 2 hours ago [-]
Israeli settlers are despicable, but even in current government those who support them are minority freaks(who Hamas has empowered very much after October 7th).
Also it is a two way street, there is also a problem of Palestinian settlers, which while I do want to highlight is separate and in no way justifies the Israeli ones, is still a real problem and harnesses a lot of bad publicity when Israel destroys said illegal settlements.
Don't make things up. Palestinians cannot settle their own land. The Israelis are the only ones settling, i.e., colonizing.
xg15 46 minutes ago [-]
Sure, they only have several ministers in the government, Likud politicians show up at settler events, they keep changing the laws to be more in favor of settlers, etc etc...
As for Palestinian settlers, where would those even be?
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
What? Settlers are totally tolerated and supported by the state. Look at Ariel, it is a fully established town settled almost 50 years ago with a university that operates in every practical way as part of Israel. If you think the government doesn't support them, what would support look like?
s5300 1 hours ago [-]
[dead]
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
Gaza has been under a near-total naval blockade since 2007 (which is an act of war BTW). Any meaningful "reduction of tensions" would have included lifting that.
neoromantique 2 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
That is an obvious lie, but also, even if it were true, who cares? It doesn't really matter what the UN thinks about anything.
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
That's not a counterpoint to what I said.
selimthegrim 3 hours ago [-]
Uh, was this happening 1967-87? Because they were sure more integrated before the First Intifada
iberator 3 hours ago [-]
I also almost believe that top echelons of Israeli intelligence knew about the upcoming attack, but they didn't expect THAT many fatalities and that Hamas were going to take hostages alive.
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
That's interesting. It could be. Maybe some day we'll find out.
prmoustache 2 hours ago [-]
A never ending conflict is what maintain the Likoud in power. This far right party and government has no interest in peace and is insulting the memory of the people who died in the holocaust.
postsantum 3 hours ago [-]
Reminds me of Tiananmen square in regard to how stubbornly westerners insist that NOTHING happened in Gaza before 7/23
ch0wn 2 hours ago [-]
> Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
That is ignoring many decades of history.
irishcoffee 1 hours ago [-]
How far back do you want to go? Jacob and Esau?
yosamino 52 minutes ago [-]
Why are you asking a ridiculous question?
To have a useful and productive discussion about the modern conflict, it's pretty obvious that we don't need to go back to Jacob and Esau, but to "Zionism" and it's enabler "European - specifically British and French - colonialism."
xg15 43 minutes ago [-]
1881 would be enough.
asadm 2 hours ago [-]
- Hamas is well-funded by Israel (to false flag?).
Forensic Architecture is a truly remarkable work. If anybody is unfamiliar with Eyal Weizman, I would highly recommend checking out more of his work. Including the 2014 series Rebel Architecture and some of his talks. He recently did a presentation called "Conditions of Life Calculated" at the David Graeber Memorial Lecture at CIIS that I think gives a lot of insight into why the work being done at Forensic Architecture is so remarkable. He also talks about his work with David Wengrow and the Nebelivka Hypothesis based on novel archeology of ancient Ukrainian cities
This is very thorough. Thanks for the direct link.
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
ignoramous 5 hours ago [-]
> case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
Detainees executed, unarmed civilians killed in their sleep, a child, handcuffed and shot, all covered up by the chain of command – this is the testimony of more than 30 eyewitnesses, former members of UK Special Forces ... Panorama – Special Forces: I Saw War Crimes ... reported a series of cold-blooded murders by UK military personnel in Iraq and Afghanistan over a period of ten years, followed by years of official cover-up.
Yes and no. It does matter because it illustrates both malicious intent and evidence of guilt, as in the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action.
However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
ignoramous 5 hours ago [-]
> the guilty party knew they were perpetrating a criminal action ... the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
"The Israeli tank commander who has fought in one of the Syrian wars is the best engineering executive in the world. The tank commanders are operationally the best, and are extremely detail oriented. This is based on twenty years of experience — working with them and observing them."
Eric Schmidt (Start-up Nation / Saul Singer et al / pg. 41)
actionfromafar 5 hours ago [-]
The tank commanders of another, bygone war also had the reputation for attention to detail. Funny how history rhymes.
stefan_ 2 hours ago [-]
"The case" is fundamentally flawed, because you can not judge a war crime by recovered evidence and post-hoc reconstructions. That's simply not what matters. It comes down only to the knowledge and intent of the soldiers and their command structure in the moment. In a war where their opponents frequently refuse to display identifying markings and indeed use subterfuge routinely, there is essentially no case to make.
War, of course, can not be prosecuted any other way. It is not police work, the artillery man, fighter jet pilot and indeed the simple infantry is routinely going to shoot at what they can not see and do not independently confirm. There is no crime in that.
basilgohar 12 minutes ago [-]
That's because it's not a war. It's a genocide. An occupied people have the right to resist their occupation. Occupiers do not have the right to prolong their occupation of said peoples. Israel is on the wrong side in all cases from its inception.
vibeprofessor 4 hours ago [-]
the only thing pretty clear is that Israeli leftists have a severe case of 'suicidal empathy' for terrorists
ChoGGi 2 hours ago [-]
I've never seen a topic I couldn't upvote before?
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
With a specificity of the number of shots and the spatial reconstruction of the scene, there's some impressive uses of tech to bolster reporting:
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
NicuCalcea 6 hours ago [-]
Forensic Architecture, the people who did the spatial reconstruction, have been around for a while. You can see more examples of their investigations here: https://forensic-architecture.org/
Forensic Architecture are great. I remember their work being very hot in the international art scene around ~2018 (when they were nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize, among others - https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/turner-prize-2...).
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago [-]
I don't know this organization but the last time I recall a sound analysis of a supposed Israeli wrong it turns out the microphone wasn't where they thought it was, it actually completely exonerated the Israeli forces.
magic_hamster 3 hours ago [-]
What digital reconstruction? They took a witness and basically did what they said in a 3D editor. I don't see anything sophisticated about this. They also did things like count weapon sounds in audio, which might be the only factual reliable data point on this report.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> They took a witness…
And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...
magic_hamster 2 hours ago [-]
From the report:
> The report by Earshot and Forensic Architecture reconstructs, minute by minute, how the massacre unfolded. Using video and audio recordings from the incident[1], open-source images and videos[2], satellite imagery[3], social media posts[4], and other materials[5], as well as in-depth interviews with two survivors of the attack[6], the groups were able to digitally reconstruct the scene and events surrounding the massacre.
So out of multiple "sources", some of which aren't even mentioned ("other materials"?), only the first one is actually from the scene. Sources 2 through 5 are not from the actual scene. The "interviews" are eye witness accounts which are extremely unreliable in this context, especially in a gunfight in the dark.
I don't know. Doesn't seem all that high-tech impressive or even reliable to me. There's also a huge problem with the team conducting this report being consistently biased in their terminology, having team members with titles like "activist", and having researchers from Ramallah and other places who are clearly a side in the conflict.
I will be glad to see a neutral, journalistic research of this incident trying to actually get to the truth and determine if there were hamas militants in the convoy, rather than see some self proclaimed activists play with google maps.
Decide for yourself if the initial Israeli claims that it was an unmarked, unlit convoy check out. Only need to see the first few seconds, if you don't wanna hear all the shooting and dying.
magic_hamster 2 hours ago [-]
I was addressing the "digital reconstruction", replying to what you said about satellite images "showing the scene" (which is wrong), not claims on whether or not emergency light was on. It would be appreciated if you actually replied to my comment.
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
The satellite images start on page 39 of the report, showing the cover-up efforts.
magic_hamster 2 hours ago [-]
Sorry to nitpick here, but using satellite from literally a different time cannot be part of the reconstruction of the events they appear to be showing in the post. So, this is just one of numerous small but misleading details. The actual reconstruction is not an incredible feat of technology, they have very little work with and have to lean heavily on eye witness accounts from people trying to make it through a gunfight at night time. This wouldn't pass any scrutiny by a real publication which is probably why it's on their blog and nowhere else.
ceejayoz 45 minutes ago [-]
The satellite shows the cover-up.
The shooting is on video, and admitted to by the IDF. After a while, when it was dug out of the grave.
Again, the video is available, from the very real publication The New York Times.
axus 4 hours ago [-]
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
yodsanklai 3 hours ago [-]
and if you don't agree, you're antisemitic
stackedinserter 4 hours ago [-]
That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, it's actually Israel's fault.
And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, Israelis deserved it.
Apply to every missile attack from Gaza over the last 15 years.
jeromegv 3 hours ago [-]
I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
How’s that similar to you?
ceejayoz 2 hours ago [-]
Look, I don't disagree, but American cities looked pretty fine after WWII, and Germany was rubble. Which side gets pounded more doesn't inherently prove which side was right.
(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)
DiogenesKynikos 1 hours ago [-]
Germany invaded most of Europe and left much of it in rubble. You're picking a very weird, specific comparison (German vs. US cities) and leaving out the obvious comparison (German vs. Soviet or Polish cities).
Also, comparing Nazi Germany, a massively powerful industrial state, with a tiny, poor territory under foreign occupation by a vastly superior power is insane.
richardfeynman 1 hours ago [-]
Gaza began the war with a more powerful army than many European countries: more soldiers, more rockets, more war-fighting infrastructure. Gaza wasn't a particularly poor place before the war, certainly not by the standards of the middle east. It had mansions and average salaries that, for some professions, were higher than average salaries in Israel. It was a net food exporter.
xg15 40 minutes ago [-]
It was also fully blockaded by Israeli (and Egyptian) forces on all sides? Israel was in full control of what was going in an out of it.
richardfeynman 31 minutes ago [-]
I don't see how that's relevant to the earlier claim, but even this claim of yours is a gross overstatement.
There was a partial blockade, not a full blockade, and this partial blockade came after Palestinians launched the second intifada. Prior to the october 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas and gazan civilians, tens of thousands of gazans were able to travel out of gaza through egypt and israel, where many of them worked. nearly 75,000 truckloads of food and cargo went into gaza from israel in 2022. Gaza exported lots too.
xg15 8 minutes ago [-]
My point is that Israel had full control about exactly what Gaza was allowed to import and export (and frequently used those controls for collective punishment as well)
I don't quite see how under those circumstances, they were able to build "a more powerful army than many European countries", unless you talk about Luxembourg or the Vatican.
The point is “which belligerent is in rubble” and “which belligerent started shit” isn’t always the same.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
> I don’t think we can truly compare the missile attacks of Hamas vs the bombing campaigns of Israel
Yes. Hamas attacks civilians, the IDF attacks Hamas.
ceejayoz 3 hours ago [-]
> That didn't happen.
Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Your comparison fails at the first step.
> And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
nailer 2 hours ago [-]
> Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Sure but pro Hamas advocates deny everything.
denkmoon 2 hours ago [-]
Good thing one can be anti genocide without being pro hamas
greekrich92 3 hours ago [-]
So the people who live in an open-air prison are on equal footing with their captors, torturers, starvers? Is that you're position?
That's rhetorical btw, since your comment was not made in good faith.
Unfortunately there is a type of person who thinks there should be no places where politics is absent, and these people will endlessly spam non-tech politics articles like this one in the hopes of a few making it to the front page and surviving being flagged.
You'll notice that posts like these don't have actual, logical discussion underneath and in their stead have repetitive slogan comments.
CommanderData 2 hours ago [-]
Israel killed UK army veterans, it was a targeted operation and a precision strike to send a message.
It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians
RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.
adv0r 3 hours ago [-]
FINALLY HN waking up
sudohalt 1 hours ago [-]
You still have people defending the occupation forces even when the soldiers themselves are bragging no social media about killing kids, and how they wished they killed more.
rekrsiv 3 hours ago [-]
You're telling me a fascist government that is actively doing every war crime it falsely accuses its neighbor of committing is above doing it to the rest of the international community? That's clearly anti-Semitic rhetoric.
manyaoman 3 hours ago [-]
I hear about IDF war crimes all the time, but this level of lying and cover-up is something new and causing me some serious cognitive dissonance right now.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
Dig1t 3 hours ago [-]
>Israeli soldiers fired over 900 bullets at the aid workers
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
vkou 1 hours ago [-]
What is the appropriate term to describe something that would do such a thing to a human being?
What should be done with it?
thenaturalist 3 hours ago [-]
What is the HN community doing to use tech to combat terrorism and defend civilian security and freedom?
jajuuka 5 hours ago [-]
I just wanna say it's nice to see more people finally waking up and smelling the ashes. I can only hope in the future this genocide will be studied to better understand the main points of failure to not repeat such a widely event covered event.
dralley 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is that both sides lie flagrantly with such frequency that very few claims about the war can be taken at face value.
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
cholantesh 4 hours ago [-]
But not the video in the OP which demonstrates that the IDF were, in fact firing on aid workers and refugees as they had been accused of, and certainly not the hours of footage of the IDF brazenly taking human shields over the years while insisting they didn't, or the reports of the IDF arming settlers. Curious that you can't enumerate any of these, and you're happy to take at face value a claim the IDF makes but doesn't allow independent third parties to verify (a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza) while abjuring such behaviour.
dralley 4 hours ago [-]
Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
cholantesh 3 hours ago [-]
>Independent 3rd parties were brought in to verify, though.
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
cess11 4 hours ago [-]
Can you link to those reports?
sosomoxie 28 minutes ago [-]
> On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket,
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
Vasbarlog 4 hours ago [-]
> problem is that both sides lie flagrantly
And yet one side is committing genocide.
suzzer99 4 hours ago [-]
And one side started it by killing 1,200 civilians and kidnapping 250. Which doesn't justify genocide. But it does factor into the response when one side is governed by a death cult that has no problem letting scores of their own civilians die if it furthers their cause.
manyaoman 37 minutes ago [-]
I don't think Hamas started it, but they definitely escalated it.
Vasbarlog 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, I didn’t know that the whole conflict started on October 6th.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
mhb 3 hours ago [-]
When do you suppose the conflict started?
Vasbarlog 3 hours ago [-]
When the first Israeli settler stole the home of a Palestinian.
thenaturalist 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
cess11 4 hours ago [-]
About 700 israeli civilians were killed, out of which an unknown number was killed by the IDF. Quite a few, if the large amount of hellfired cars are anything to go by, and the kibbutzim inhabitants weren't very happy about being shelled by tanks.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
dralley 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
7952 3 hours ago [-]
The difference between Hamas and Israel is the magnitude of effect. And that for most of the war one party had much more capacity to change its course than the other. But either way criticism of the semantics and focus of media just seems irrelevant and overly abstract. It focuses too much on the group and not enough on the individual. Which drags the argument into the realm that ethno-nationalists of either side occupy. Death is always a tragedy and unnecessary killing is immoral. Anything deeper than that stinks of ignorance and is grotesque.
incahoots 3 hours ago [-]
Here I thought leaving reddit would provide a break of low quality bait, yet here we are.
Vasbarlog 3 hours ago [-]
Exactly! Wtf
throwaway3060 3 hours ago [-]
Even then, Gaza is far more dense than Grozny; almost certainly the Grozny campaign was conducted with far more deliberate indifference to any concept of morality.
Vasbarlog 3 hours ago [-]
What Israel is doing is genocide. The International Association of Genocide Scholars say so https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS... . Is there anyone who is arguing, in ”good faith” as you say, that the atrocities of October 7th were a genocide?
thenaturalist 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
khazhoux 3 hours ago [-]
And the other side just. won’t. stop. attacking.
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
Vasbarlog 3 hours ago [-]
You could say that about Israel too you know. The other side just. Won’t. Stop. Attacking. Israelis can’t stop sniping children.
zaptheimpaler 3 hours ago [-]
The media organizations and people who pushed the pro-Israel narrative already understand all of this - it's not a failure, it was their intended goal.
wao0uuno 4 hours ago [-]
It's gonna happen again and again and again until the end of humanity.
incahoots 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mhb 3 hours ago [-]
And which country will welcome the 8 million people living there?
incahoots 2 hours ago [-]
The ones featured in their secondary passports.
mattmaroon 4 hours ago [-]
It’s strange to me when otherwise intelligent people call this genocide. Genocide is an attempt to exterminate an entire people. Israel is a nuclear armed nation fighting against the equivalent of Dayton, OH.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
3 hours ago [-]
zorked 4 hours ago [-]
Your are using an argument similar to the repugnant logic of Holocaust deniers. They use claims that Germany could have easily killed Jews /even faster/ as an argument to claim that they didn't commit genocide /at all/.
erezsh 1 hours ago [-]
It's a ridiculous argument. The Nazis went through a LOT of effort and resources to gather Jews from all the corners of Europe, and even more effort into exterminating them as fast as they could, within the logistical and economic constraints of fighting a 3 front war.
There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.
manyaoman 19 minutes ago [-]
The fact that I just spent five minutes thinking about it proves that it's not ridiculous at all. The scale is different (so far), but I’m not convinced there’s a qualitative difference.
sosomoxie 24 minutes ago [-]
The only thing stopping Israel from doing that is international outrage. Israel is entirely dependent on its benefactor states like the US and, while it pushes the limits to the extreme, must at least contend with world opinion.
superb_dev 4 hours ago [-]
How is long term ethnic cleansing different from genocide?
“Your honor and members of the jury: my client could have easily committed way worse crimes!”
wayeq 4 hours ago [-]
> If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
neoromantique 3 hours ago [-]
Why does israel use expensive precise munitions wherever possible rather than their stockpiles of much more deadly "dumb" ones?
wayeq 39 minutes ago [-]
maybe because they are trying to act ethically toward a murderous neighbor that is conducting asymmetric warfare and those are the best tools to accomplish that.
or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.
i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.
NickC25 3 hours ago [-]
because it would be admitting to the world that it has said weapons.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
thenaturalist 2 hours ago [-]
The argument conveniently always goes such that Israel is the baddie.
Curious how that goes, especially since Israels ulterior motives are always implied, they're not taken by their word.
And Islamists, who share their motives openly with anyone willing to listen are ignored.
neoromantique 2 hours ago [-]
by dumb munitions I mean older bombs vs JDAM and alike.
Anyone who seriously speaks words 'nuclear weapon' and 'gaza' together is basically admitting he has 0 clue about the situation and is uninformed larper for either side.
yosamino 2 hours ago [-]
Yes, there is a long term effort by the State of Israel to remove Palestinian life from Palestinian land.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.
upmind 5 hours ago [-]
If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more. Unfortunately, nothing seems to be happening to Israel.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
> If this was happening against the west, people would care a lot more
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
kombine 4 hours ago [-]
> On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel
Sure. Though Western arms absolutely play heavily in Sudan and across South America. My point is it’s odd to single out Gaza as a case where the West doesn’t care. It’s more that it uniquely has folks in the West who care strongly about both sides.
troupo 3 hours ago [-]
> Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
throwaway3060 3 hours ago [-]
I hear this sentiment a lot when it comes to people trying to justify why Ukrainians or Iranians are somehow less deserving of their attentions, and it infuriates me every time. If the goal is to try to prevent unjustified killings, then it makes no sense.
kombine 3 hours ago [-]
I personally raise awareness about Ukraine and Palestine in equal measure. But there is fundamental difference: Israelis will stop their violence on Palestinians the minute they lose support of the US and Europ, whereas the West doesn't hold the same leverage over Russia.
throwaway3060 3 hours ago [-]
I disagree with many parts of this narrative, but even this fundamental hypothesis that Israel will just give up without Western support, that there is absolute leverage, I have no idea where it comes from or what evidence suggests this. If Israel feels they need to do this, they will just source supplies from somewhere else. And everyone will be worse off for it.
justin66 8 minutes ago [-]
> And everyone will be worse off for it.
There is nothing obviously true about that statement.
peterashford 3 hours ago [-]
It makes perfect sense. In a democracy your government (supposedly) represents you, thus the actions of your government are those you are partly morally responsible for and partly have some control over. If Russia or China is selling AK47s to warlords in Sudan, there's not much that westerners can do about it
JumpCrisscross 2 hours ago [-]
> thus the actions of your government are those you are partly morally responsible for and partly have some control over
America has global force projection power. It has about as much influence in Gaza as it does in e.g. Venezuela or even, arguably, Iran.
Everyone has good reasons for why their pet war is the most central to our interests. I think it’s fair to accept that there are multiple good answers.
throwaway3060 56 minutes ago [-]
This is supposing that people only have an obligation to not cause harm, and that those who are able have no moral obligation to actively help protect those who need and deserve it. Kind of like the trolley problem, I suppose.
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
> It’s literally happening in Ukraine
Ukraine isn't part of the West.
> to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis
What was happening in Minneapolis is not only much smaller in scale than what's happening in Palestine, it's also just a completely different thing.
4 hours ago [-]
AuthAuth 2 hours ago [-]
People dont actually care about the results. Atrocities far worse are happening in Sudan and there is not a peep from any of the people that have made being anti genocide their entire personality for the past 2 years.
Its information warfare using the issue as a proxy to attack and undermine western democracy.
MagicMoonlight 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
epolanski 12 hours ago [-]
There's plenty of live footage of IDF forces targeting international aid workers and journalists.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
pcthrowaway 6 hours ago [-]
And WW2 only has more journalist deaths because some number of the genocide casualties had been journalists before the Holocaust.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
throwawaysleep 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
conartist6 11 hours ago [-]
From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story. But the stories coming from the region are horrific! Is it true that it is the official policy of the IDF to shoot to kill children who throw stones at them?
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
prmoustache 2 hours ago [-]
> the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story.
By being good guys, you surely mean by being white guys colonizing a territory, exproprating previous land owners and bringing death and despair all around them. Sounds right, that is the history of white colonization.
umanwizard 2 hours ago [-]
> From where I sit nobody is questioning that the Israelis are supposed to be the good guys in this story.
That's a baffling claim.
Israelis emphatically not being "the good guys in this story" is a very mainstream (though not necessarily majority) view in every country in the world, possibly with the exception of Israel itself.
superb_dev 4 hours ago [-]
Im questioning whether the Israelis are the good guys. Frankly I don’t know how you can look at their history of provocation and unbalanced retaliation and not begin to wonder if maybe they aren’t the good guys
tovej 5 hours ago [-]
Where I'm sitting, nobody would question that Israel is and has been the bad guy since 1948. Before that it was the Jewish Agency for Palestine/World Zionist Organisation and the British.
Israel has been an apartheid performing ethnic cleansing and a slow genocide during its whole existence.
12 hours ago [-]
idop 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
aa-jv 12 hours ago [-]
The slaughter of journalists is documented throughout modern history - by the very people those journalists worked for.
idop 12 hours ago [-]
This sentence has no meaning.
throwawaysleep 12 hours ago [-]
We have the loosest definition of "journalist" in history. Most of the journalists on the list worked for nobody in particular or for Hamas, Iran, the Palestinian Authority, or some other group like Hezbollah. By these standards, William Joyce would be a journalist.
urikaduri 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
urikaduri 11 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
coolca 5 hours ago [-]
Disgusted by this, I hope that the good people of Israel realize what their hideous regime is doing and stop it.
I know for sure that
ebbi 4 hours ago [-]
The problem is majority of Israeli citizens think the government isn't doing enough.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
woodruffw 4 hours ago [-]
> The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
incahoots 3 hours ago [-]
Might behoove you to know how schooling in that "country" is handled..especially when it comes to Palestinians. Below is an excellent insight as to how this is a "country" wide homegrown effort to raise unhinged cilivians that celebrate the murder of children & women.
Exactly. I replied to the comment above, but a lot of people don't appreciate the right-left divide in Israel is very different to that in other western nations. A leftist in Israel would probably be considered extreme right in some other nations.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
I know a fair number of leftists of both Israeli and Palestinian extraction, and I don't really think this is true. The more nuanced and IMO correct appreciation of left-right politics in Israel (and MENA more generally) is that they're flavored but not inherently dominated by ethnonationalist movements that reached their fever pitch in the 20th century, and have slowly been replaced by ethoreligious movements that have substituted declining follower numbers for more extreme activity.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
I don't know what to tell you. If you think I don't believe that Israel structurally dehumanizes Palestinians, you'd be wrong. But you'd also be wrong in thinking that this is somehow a deviation from the norm; both sides are actively governed by their political extremes, like I said.
incahoots 2 hours ago [-]
You're painting with broad-strokes here which comes off as disingenuous, I presume that's not your intention but it calls into question your understanding of the history between these states being laid bare.
I suggest reading Hamas' 2017 charter in full for proper context.
woodruffw 2 hours ago [-]
I think I understand the two pretty well. And I've read both the 2017 and 1988 charters. The funny thing about charters is that you can put anything in them; the IDF's charter[1] is an exercise in frustration for anybody who knows literally anything about how the IDF actually behaves, and so for Hamas.
A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This also tracks with my travels to Palestine, friends who have travelled more recently, and various videos and article: the right-left in Israel is quite different to the right-left in other Western nations: namely, if you talk to a leftist Israeli, they will also hold strong view against Palestinians.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
> A stat I came across recently is that over 60% of Israeli's don't support a two state solution - i.e. they don't support the idea of Palestinians having a state.
This is, critically, a pretty different political position from defending people accused of wartime rape. That doesn't make it a good position, but we shouldn't conflate the two.
As for why: Israelis don't appear to disapprove of a two-state solution any more or less than Palestinians[1]. Both are absolutely committed to the idea that their one-state solution will be supreme.
Two years after the 2005 Israeli unilateral withdrawal from Gaza (and the Israeli government evicted Israeli settlers from Gaza), the support in Israel for a two-state solution was 70% in favor.
They were optimistic!
Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.
After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.
ebbi 59 minutes ago [-]
The 'withdrawal' wasn't really a withdrawal, was it. There was still a blockade, and IDF's routine 'mowing the lawn'.
Let's not pretend that the 2005 'withdrawal' was a chance for a fresh start for the Palestinians that they floundered. The various negotiations were very one sided, and the offers were also unacceptable.
kombine 4 hours ago [-]
Only 5% of Israelis believe that IDF used too much violence in Gaza..
Aloisius 2 hours ago [-]
That's surprising low given 21% of the population are Israeli Arabs.
weird_tentacles 5 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
RIMR 5 hours ago [-]
Damn, the IDF got this guy mid-sentence...
jihadjihad 4 hours ago [-]
WHAT DOES HE KNOW FOR SURE???
dkersten 4 hours ago [-]
The IDF are terrorists and war criminals.
thenaturalist 1 hours ago [-]
Irish siding with a colonial terrorist power which flounders its genocidal ambitions freely financed by a petro state which also flounders its genocidal ambitions freely instead of the indigenous people of a land who's artefacts and scriptures are in the name of the land as well as dug up from the ground has to be the biggest moral confusion of the 21st century.
pram 50 minutes ago [-]
You mean the Philistines?
bamboozled 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
neaden 4 hours ago [-]
People in places like this generally don't feel the need to condemn Hamas because it's understood that they are bad. Hamas is not an ally of the United States, it's troops and police force don't train with the United States military, it does not buy weapons from United States factories, and it does not receive government aid from the United States. If you feel the need to, you can add a condemnation of Hamas to basically every post here and it'll be accurate. Hell if you want to add a condemnation to the Iranian and North Korean governments too while you're there, that'd be fine too.
criddell 3 hours ago [-]
There are a bunch of people here who are university students and Hamas support isn't as low as you might think on western campuses.
bdhe 3 hours ago [-]
Hamas support or Palestinian support?
appreciatorBus 3 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
yosamino 2 hours ago [-]
The meaning of your comment is
> The people I don't agree with are too stupid to understand what they are supporting.
That is lazy thinking, and your claim is unsubstantiated.
That doesn't move a discussion towards a better understanding of each other, it fosters division.
Please don't do that.
NickC25 3 hours ago [-]
Hamas also doesn't have nuclear weapons.
nitwit005 3 hours ago [-]
If the only defense you can think up is that Hamas is worse, it's a bad sign.
bamboozled 2 hours ago [-]
It's not a defense, it's a constant reminder that one side is bad or worse. As someone who believes in modern values and society, I think it's very important to acknowledge all of the recent events.
If you care about the victims, you should also care about the victims at the music festival too. Because they're one and the same, innocent people who were murdered for stupid ideology.
pavel_lishin 3 hours ago [-]
If you're going to put words in someone's mouth, at least make them big words.
guerrilla 3 hours ago [-]
Whataboutism.
tchalla 3 hours ago [-]
The article was about IDF, not Hamas.
mdni007 2 hours ago [-]
I wonder how much the mods of HN gets from Isreal for removing any comment supporting Palestine and allowing Hasbara bot accounts to spread propaganda as they please.
LightBug1 1 hours ago [-]
My usual reminder that Israel is a ludicrous, absurd ideology. Countless Jewish scholars agree, so this isn't some anti-semitic rant (if that phrase even has any meaning any more).
Israel needs to be de-Nazified like they did to the Germans after they were defeated in WW2.
mapt 12 hours ago [-]
Why was this flagged? Automatically / without review? This is a novel tech story, albeit one without a lot of technical detail.
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
lma21 12 hours ago [-]
Any posts linked to the IDF committing crimes are automatically flagged on this site (and others). Many bots are at play here.
austin-cheney 5 hours ago [-]
Its not automatic due to bot activity. It is from people actively suppressing stories that don't want other people to see.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
Guid_NewGuid 5 hours ago [-]
Indeed, and try suggesting there should be minimal accountability for flagging[0] and you'll likewise be flagged. Sure maybe the data says there's not some cartel flagging conspiracy but it starts to seem awful suspicious that even reasonable discussion of this misfeature gets flagged.
You always have plenty of excuses when you get called out. Looking the other way while bot armies mass downvote pro Palestine / anti ICE / anti PayPal mafia content is complicity. I’m sure you have the data to suss out what is obvious to anyone watching these threads in real time.
johnfn 5 hours ago [-]
Think about what you are saying for a moment. Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles? Don't you think it's a much more reasonable conclusion that people read the site guidelines[1], which clearly say that political posts are off-topic, and then flagged for that reason instead?
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
> Why would "bot armies" come to Hacker News of all places to flag pro-Palestine articles?
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
glenstein 4 hours ago [-]
In 2026 I don't for one second think it organized inauthentic activity is implausible. I think in fact it's probably pretty extensive these days, though I'm not especially sure about penetration of HN in particular. But everything from marketing to state actors to organized political actors to anarchic but politically motivated online groups are mobilized to influence online forums and I think these phenomena are reasonably well characterized by academic research. It can also be people who aren't organized but abuse flagging out of political commitments.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
Guid_NewGuid 5 hours ago [-]
I mean doesn't your take strain credulity as well? Let's actually think where most discussion happens these days, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, the few remaining newspaper comments sections. I'd struggle to list more off the top of my head.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
johnfn 1 hours ago [-]
I just see the same thing over again. I flag some article, then later I look at the comments and everyone is saying "rah rah there's a cabal of vote bots that flag articles". Obviously not - it was me? Is it so unthinkable that normal people on HN are flagging political articles because they are explicitly disallowed by the site guidelines?
lyingliarsg 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
modsareliars12 6 hours ago [-]
[dead]
lyingfireb 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
therobots927 5 hours ago [-]
11 minutes and you’re almost totally grayed out. Wild that they think this type of suppression isn’t blatantly obvious to anyone with a brain.
ebbi 5 hours ago [-]
It's desperation at this point. With each passing day, the truth comes out in clear, non-negotiable detail, and therefore the desperation to hide and/or deflect increases.
JumpCrisscross 4 hours ago [-]
I didn’t flag. But the top comments are nothing to do with the tech, and aren’t dissimilar from any Gaza War commentary online.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
34679 2 hours ago [-]
You can just click on your username in the upper right and change "showdead" from "no" to "yes".
smartbit 9 hours ago [-]
In https://hckrnews.com these flagged items appear listed. With https://hckrnews.com as my entry into HN I don't see the need for HackerNewsRemovals other than curiosity to see what is removed.
Mike Huckabee said yesterday that all the land from the Nile to the Euphrates should be taken by Israel. That would involve a cleansing of hundreds of millions of people.
woodruffw 3 hours ago [-]
Mike Huckabee is a clown who was more or less strategically plonked into Israel to feed soothing quotes to the settler minority. I think it'd be an error to assume that his particularly evil flavor of Christian eschatology reflects the political or military policies of Israel (which is saying a lot, since Israel's military policy is very clearly good at producing war crimes).
loeg 47 minutes ago [-]
Huckabee is some official spokesperson of the Israeli government? Or holds some other role in it?
georgemcbay 4 hours ago [-]
Huckabee is a Christian Zionist.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
whatshisface 4 hours ago [-]
This is commonly misconstrued as christianity, but in christian tradition it would bring about the coming of the antichrist, massive persecutions globally, and armageddon.
thrance 4 hours ago [-]
Keep in mind that these powerful men believe that Jewish people coming back to Israel is the first step of the Apocalypse, and the return of Christ. It is a death cult quite literally trying to bring about the end of the world, and they're ruling the world. Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
> Also, they are insanely antisemitic and believe most Jews will go to hell.
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
herdst 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
heyitsmedotjayb 4 hours ago [-]
If they're not seeking to take it, then why are Zionist settlers currently crossing into Syria and taking it?
halflife 2 hours ago [-]
Because they are crazy people? Not representing anyone in Israel?
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
forvelin 12 hours ago [-]
why is this flagged ?
myrmidon 9 hours ago [-]
I'll give you the "party line" (i.e. best-effort understanding of HN-moderators perspective) for why articles like this are frequently flagged:
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
dang 6 hours ago [-]
You left out the parts about how and when we turn flags off, about how a certain amount of political overlap is both necessary and inevitable, but that it also can't be too much. All of those are important factors, and I've posted many explanations of them:
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
computerex 6 hours ago [-]
I literally can’t say anything pro humanity without it being flagged even if it hints negativity towards Israel.
EvgeniyZh 6 hours ago [-]
Can you remember any pro-Israeli posts you turned flags off for since the October 7 attack?
underdeserver 6 hours ago [-]
Can you point to any pro-Israeli posts on HN since October 7, flagged or not?
a456463 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
computerex 6 hours ago [-]
They don’t get flagged though.
EvgeniyZh 5 hours ago [-]
Yes they are, just like the comment you answered to will.
a456463 6 hours ago [-]
This is such a garbage assessment. I have don't see post of pro-Israel companies and startups that fund/enable this massacre being flagged for political content?
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
RobotToaster 6 hours ago [-]
> there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
_DeadFred_ 5 hours ago [-]
What are you talking about? Iran topics get flagged at least as often as Gaza (in proportion to the amount to posts on the topic).
> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
The forensic reconstruction to this level of detail is novel and interesting, both for the methods deployed and for the likelihood that the half-life of unsolved war crimes appears to be decreasing.
ycombinatrix 12 hours ago [-]
This is most certainly not something that is covered on TV news. Seems on topic to me.
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
I think it also touches on issues of interest to the hn crowd (it's being reported on a YC-incubated platform!), and one especially unique things about the reporting is the spatial reconstruction of the scene, which is not a degree of detail you typically get, and limits the number of variations of interpretations possible.
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
appreciatorBus 12 hours ago [-]
Israel and Palestine is one of the most obsessively covered topics in every form of western media. All the more the reason it doesn’t belong on HN. I’ll grant that there’s a tech angle to this specific story, but past experience with such articles on HN is that they reliably devolve into endless repetition of fixed talking points on each side. No useful information or opinion is conveyed, just endless insinuation and infective.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
glenstein 10 hours ago [-]
I agree that Bluesky is a great place to go into more depth about it, and in many respects a better place than HN to get good discussion. But I think there's equivocation going on here.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
ycombinatrix 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
mhb 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ycombinatrix 12 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
simonjanssen 12 hours ago [-]
I think the solution which will lead to the best quality of life for people in and around the levant is a single, secular state. Two states that are both ethnonationalist is unsustainable, and any single state which isn't secular can only be achieved through genocide. Freedom to practice whatever religion, seperation of church and state, and no apartheid for a certain group of people.
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
Dang, I'm writing this reply as a target of antisemitic hate. I am not strictly a Jew (though I am often mistaken for one due to both name and appearance). My relatives were hunted and gassed in WW2.
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
It might not be the most substantive comment ever made. But by now it is about as classic as the Stephen Colbert quote ”reality has a well-known liberal bias”, and I bet you would not consider that quote hateful near-bannable offence, versus Republicans, right? It follows the exact pattern, and has a similar connotation. There is a large contingency in power in Israel and the west who loudly considers the truth to be antisemitism. Therefore we have a duty (BECAUSE ALL OTHER WAYS HAVE CLEARLY FAILED) as human beings to mock them. And what better way to mock them (like a court jester) than to use their words against them?
throwaway3060 4 hours ago [-]
There are others here who would strongly disagree with this view, or the other views expressed on here. Personally, I was startled by the post in question, even as I wondered what was actually meant by it. We all have to coexist on here.
Y-bar 4 hours ago [-]
Were you more or less startled by reading it here or hearing those words from the mouth of Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel's Minister of National Security since 2022?
dang 4 hours ago [-]
Here's a tip I learned the hard way: you can't assume that other commenters have seen or heard the same things that you have; and when they have, you can't assume that they have the same subset in working memory.
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
4 hours ago [-]
Y-bar 4 hours ago [-]
Sorry, didn’t know that was your alt account.
dang 3 hours ago [-]
Hmm - out of curiosity, what did I say or do that made you post this?
ivan_gammel 12 hours ago [-]
No. Your message is. A lot of people commit mortal sin of logical fallacy by extending the responsibility for actions of certain group of people to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion. It‘s the stupidity worth of the strongest condemnation given the context.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
ycombinatrix 12 hours ago [-]
I think GP was making a joke - since zionists claim any anti-zionist behavior is anti-semitic.
ivan_gammel 12 hours ago [-]
Then I apologize without retraction.
SauciestGNU 10 hours ago [-]
Good instinct to fight against antisemitism, because there is a lot of it. Unfortunately the Israeli government lobs accusations of antisemitism at its (legitimate) critics frequently, enough so to muddy the waters between actual antisemitism and criticism of the Israeli state.
ivan_gammel 8 hours ago [-]
Nah, let’s not let them to set the narrative. It is not antisemitism to criticize Israel and I do not care what Israeli or my (German) government says about it.
jquery 12 hours ago [-]
Yep. It's used as a shield for the worst humanity has to offer.
halflife 2 hours ago [-]
Zionism is the idea of self determination of Jews in their homeland. You separate Jews from zionists. How would you call the Palestinian self determination movement, would you separate it from the rest of the Palestinians? Would you call that group for committing war crimes?
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
Their message didn't make any of the extrapolations that you're suggesting and I don't think that the post itself does that either.
ivan_gammel 12 hours ago [-]
The message is ambiguous. It can be interpreted the way I read it.
glenstein 10 hours ago [-]
I disagree that it's ambiguous, and I think how you choose to interpret it comes down to the difference between charitable interpretation and bad faith.
ivan_gammel 8 hours ago [-]
Whether you agree with it or not, does not matter. It is ambiguous due to a simple fact that I did not had the choice of interpretation in my mind. It is how I understood it and it differs from your understanding. The author should have been more clear.
blitzar 12 hours ago [-]
> why is this flagged ?
Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic
> committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
SAI_Peregrinus 9 hours ago [-]
Zionism isn't an ethnicity or a religion.
GuinansEyebrows 6 hours ago [-]
whether or not you agree that zionism is intrinsically jewish or not, it would serve you to understand that the poster you're arguing against does not believe that zionism is intrinsically jewish, and thus, you're talking past them.
mothballed 12 hours ago [-]
But it's not all zionists committing war crimes in Gaza, it's the IDF. And it's not all IDF members, only some individuals. And its not all of those some individuals, only some of their brain and trigger finger. And it's not all the time, only some of the time.
We mustn't generalize.
ivan_gammel 12 hours ago [-]
You are surprisingly right. I know people who served in IDF and would prefer to have nothing in common with those criminals. Generalizing to them would be wrong. It is not voluntary service, different people are required to serve. But people aside, is IDF as institution rotten? It is not generalization to say „yes“, when such things happen. An institution is an entity with the agency to prevent such things and not only did it fail, it covered up. Is Israeli government complicit? Hell, yes, same reason.
1718627440 12 hours ago [-]
There were people in the German army (Wehrmacht) who wanted to have nothing in common with those criminals. Some even tried to kill Hitler and get rid of the regime.
orwin 11 hours ago [-]
Not the majority though, else the wehrmacht would have done less war crimes.
1718627440 11 hours ago [-]
I think this depends on whether you draw the boundary at "refuses to do X even when killed for it" or "wouldn't have done X on their own".
throwaw12 11 hours ago [-]
IDF is an army of Israel, not some unknown militant group.
Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately.
lostmsu 12 hours ago [-]
I believe religion is a reasonable extension. Some of them explicitly call for murdering unbelievers.
ivan_gammel 12 hours ago [-]
it‘s „some“, not „all“. Religious extremism by definition.
lostmsu 11 hours ago [-]
I was talking about religions, not individuals.
asdfss674564 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
jLaForest 11 hours ago [-]
@dang any explanation for this being flagged?
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
dang 5 hours ago [-]
Here are some stories that flaggers of this submission also flagged. I have no idea why, except for the handful of obvious spam, but it illustrates the point I made in the parent comment.
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
dang 4 hours ago [-]
If the above list gives the mistaken impression that flagging is basically random, that's an artifact of the way I cherry-picked the list. The flagging system has problems, for sure, but it's a vital part of how HN's system functions.
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
Funny to see the complaints of this being flagged but no complaints about people posting here flagged. If these aren't going to be open discussions and responses get flagged to invisibility what is the purpose?
churchill 12 hours ago [-]
[dead]
churchill 12 hours ago [-]
Isn't mass murder of civilians the most Israeli thing ever? For those out of the loop, this isn't an anomaly.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
Try the percentages the other way around. What do the Palestinians want?
And look at who is actually committing genocide--basically 100% radical Islam.
sosomoxie 19 minutes ago [-]
Palestinians just want their stolen land back and not to be murdered by an invading force backed by a global superpower.
badc0ffee 4 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
I do like to set a personal moral standard a little higher than "what would Hamas endorse?"
throwaw12 12 hours ago [-]
Things are in terrible state in the world.
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
glenstein 12 hours ago [-]
>Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
rbanffy 6 hours ago [-]
I wouldn’t point to Epstein, but there is a very powerful lobby that will protect the image of any Israeli government. A lot of Evangelicals also consider Israel important in bringing about the apocalypse, without which they can’t access eternal life. I wish I was kidding on that last one, but there are people actively trying to bring down civilisation so they can go to heaven.
asdfss674564 6 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
kvgr 12 hours ago [-]
Not Israel, but Russia - good old KGB honeytrap.
7952 12 hours ago [-]
> * No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
throwaw12 12 hours ago [-]
Travel to Middle East, some parts of Africa and China, ask what people think. Most say have similar opinion that west is not "morally" superior.
rbanffy 6 hours ago [-]
South America as well, in particular with regard to the US. Too many coups and sponsorship of military dictatorships will do that.
spwa4 7 hours ago [-]
Travel to anywhere, anywhere at all, ask people if they consider themselves morally superior ...
vcryan 6 hours ago [-]
Well, in this case, they are correct
spwa4 3 hours ago [-]
suuure
asdfss674564 6 hours ago [-]
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ebbi 5 hours ago [-]
I think when people say "West", they automatically think US and UK - and given their war crimes in recent history, you do get this sentiment, yes. I suspect, however, that this view has exacerbated and now includes other "western" countries that are silent/complicit in current horrific war crimes.
6 hours ago [-]
jquery 12 hours ago [-]
Real shame this got flagged so quickly, too. This is prime HN material.
indoordin0saur 5 hours ago [-]
Isn't this a tech news site?
estearum 5 hours ago [-]
Did you click on the link? It's a pretty amazing technological investigation.
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
dudefeliciano 11 hours ago [-]
this is prime material for HN to flag...
datsci_est_2015 6 hours ago [-]
Is there an HN but for anarchists? Or maybe just anti-authoritarians?
culi 4 hours ago [-]
There's 4chan but for leftists (leftypol) and there's reddit for leftists (lemmy or raddle). I'd also argue Mastodon is kind of twitter for leftists/hackers
glitchc 6 hours ago [-]
The Atlantic? I kid. I really mean Al-Jazeera.
diffs 4 hours ago [-]
I think The Atlantic is actually pretty close to the mark. Committed, hardcore ideologues frequently turn out to be authoritarian, even if they refer to themselves as "anarchists". Most of these ideologues are busy administering ever more stringent purity tests to anyone they encounter lest someone in their vicinity commit wrongthink.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
thomassmith65 5 hours ago [-]
There are no anti-authoritarian news outlets in Qatar, for obvious reasons.
Of course, that's because Qatar actually is an authoritarian state, unlike the US. It hasn't stopped Al-Jazeera from challenging the authority of other nations or claiming that they are authoritarian. Pot, meet kettle and all that.
CommanderData 2 hours ago [-]
If we can't flag it, make it disappear from the front page.
Collectively done via Israel's RiseApp and similar.
eej71 5 hours ago [-]
No, its not. And I gladly flagged it.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
DrewADesign 5 hours ago [-]
> No, it’s not. And I gladly flagged it.
> Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
thenaturalist 5 hours ago [-]
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ebbi 5 hours ago [-]
Oh no, we shouldn't talk about war crimes because the iPhone I'm tapping my words into has some tech from the nation committing those war crimes. I should be more THANKFUL!
thenaturalist 5 hours ago [-]
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thenaturalist 6 hours ago [-]
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jayquery 5 hours ago [-]
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throwaw12 12 hours ago [-]
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gopheryourshelf 5 hours ago [-]
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iufybbyy 6 hours ago [-]
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blacklight 4 hours ago [-]
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rainmaking 3 hours ago [-]
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NickC25 3 hours ago [-]
>If you go around accusing Israel of genocide, deliberately omitting the little detail of facing an enemy who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
yosamino 2 hours ago [-]
I find that a good sniff-test in politics is to change the actor in a claim to be Jewish and then consider if that make the claim an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
Works surprisingly well.
For example:
> facing an enemy [Hamas] who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative, and in a similar way that antisemitism has nothing really to do with Jews, but rather with antisemites what you are writing here just shows your hatred.
> does everything to get their own people killed
for the purposed of making the killer look bad, is such a naïve take on this.
Do you think netanyahu and his cronies care about "looking bad" ? To whom ? That ship has sailed since at least the 90ies.
loeg 51 minutes ago [-]
> Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative,
Your substitution turns a true statement into a false statement; this mechanism is at best meaningless. Yes, making false claims about Jews is antisemitic, but that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
yosamino 13 minutes ago [-]
> Yes, making false claims about Jews is antisemitic
No. Making false claims about Jews is just lying about Jews.
Antisemitism deals in lies, but the defining characteristic of antisemitism is not the lie itself, it's the use of the lie to cast out the Jewish people from the circle of humans to make them into an outsider and threat to humanity itself. The lie is just a tool and it depends on the kind of lie.
> that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
your assertion here is that the statement in question
> [Hamas] does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
is true and not false.
What you are claiming it that Hamas is breaking a very fundamental rule of being human, in that they not only don't care about their own being killed but that they "do everything they can to get their own people killed."
Which is a standard propaganda tactic to assigning to you enemy the most depraved characteristics to convince your side that the enemy is not even really fully human.
It's a transparent and stupid tactic, and it begets hatred.
LorenPechtel 2 hours ago [-]
Which does not deny the fact that Hamas deliberately gets people killed.
I recall some time ago an Israeli strike--they hit with a roof knocker, Hamas responded by ordering the neighbors to rush to the roof. Too slow, the house was packed with people when the bomb fell. And somehow that's Israel's fault?!
And in past conflicts 20-25% of the Palestinian deaths are from Hamas munitions that fall short. It's unlikely to be that high in this case, but we have things like that first "Israeli" hospital "strike" with "500 dead"--come daylight it's obviously a rocket that blew up at or very soon after ignition. And we have an Al Jazzera "report" "showing" that it was an Israeli weapon--never mind that it didn't actually show the incident at all and that Iron Dome is completely incapable of shooting down a rocket that's taking off. Missiles take time to get there, you can't hit a rocket that has been in the air less than the flight time of a missile reaching it.
yosamino 1 hours ago [-]
> I recall some time ago an Israeli strike--they hit with a roof knocker, Hamas responded by ordering the neighbors to rush to the roof. Too slow, the house was packed with people when the bomb fell. And somehow that's Israel's fault?!
I don't even understand what you are trying to tell me here. You are constructing a sourceless story that after the Israeli Army dropped a small bomb on a house ( "roof knocker" is a euphemism) Hamas ordered some civilians to go on top of the roof.
Hamas did this, in your telling, because they knew that the first small bomb, was the precursor to a large second bomb designed to explode the whole building.
What would be the military objective here? Hamas knows that human shields do not stop the Israeli army. So it was not to stop the Israeli army from blowing up the building.
Even worse, your logic is not even that Hamas ordered the civilians to go up on the roof not because they thought it would prevent the Israeli army from blowing up the house, you write
> Hamas deliberately gets people killed.
that means you think that Hamas sent these people on the roof to let the Israeli army execute them, not even to use them as a human shield.
That is such a confused story.
Can you explain what you are talking about ?
What probably really happened is that Israel did a double tap: attack once, wait for people to rush back to tend to the injured, attack them again.
While atrocious, there is at least a military tactic behind this.
Your story about Hamas sending people on a roof in order for them to be killed has no sense to it and it seems it's only purpose is to dehumanize Palestinians.
But maybe I am off here. Please explain what you were trying to tell me again.
km3r 53 minutes ago [-]
> the Israeli Army dropped a small bomb on a house
Roof knocking is using non explosive ordinance. It is, by definition, not a bomb. Attacking its use is wild, its a tactic that saves civilian lives, even if you disagree with the validity of the target.
> that means you think that Hamas sent these people on the roof to let the Israeli army execute them, not even to use them as a human shield.
Yes. That is what human shielding is. The unfortunate reality is that it is irresponsible to completely stop attacks when human shielding is used, as it encourages further use of the practice. Just like blaming Israel for all of those death is also encouraging Hamas to further use the tactic.
> What would be the military objective here?
Hamas has been very clear that deaths of their civilians further the Palestinian cause by causing the world to turn on Israel. The objective here is clear.
Now I turn it back to you: what is the military purpose of roof knocking?
No double tapping doesn't make sense here. You wouldn't use a non-explosive ordinance if the goal was "double tapping"
yosamino 31 minutes ago [-]
I was going to write a whole different comment, but then I thought
> What if, yosamino, your knowledge of the euphemism of knocking on a roof is outdated and this km3r is right? you should probably double check so that in case they are right, you are not having a stupid argument but one backed by facts.
And then I found this hilarious quote:
> As women and children lived in the house, a Hellfire missile was initially shot at the roof as a warning.
referring to American slaughter in Mosul, but still relevant.
The more relevant description is in this article
> The US has adopted a controversial air strike technique known as "roof-knocking", which is best known for its use by Israeli forces during conflicts in Gaza.
> The tactic involves detonating a small explosive above the roof a target as a way of signalling to nearby civilians to get out of range.
Which tracks a lot better with the descriptions of the practice I have heard from people who experienced it.
So while this is from 2016 and by that metric is 10 years old, you'd have to please show me some information about the army of the state of Israel downgrading their tactics from sending as small bomb to sending a ... what are you claiming they are dropping? a rock ?
km3r 12 minutes ago [-]
“Roof knocking” is when the IAF targets a building with a loud but non-lethal bomb that warns civilians that they are in the vicinity of a weapons cache or other target.
Cause their post sounds like some AI wrote it, and I guess everyone else noticed, too.
SSLy 12 hours ago [-]
shablu shouldn't sounds like a LLM (no, i didn't flag or downvote it)
Xmd5a 12 hours ago [-]
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HappyPanacea 4 hours ago [-]
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ceejayoz 4 hours ago [-]
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
Seems like interesting tech.
gryzzly 3 hours ago [-]
Much discussion of the tech here, lots of it. Should be definitely flagged.
xinuc 2 hours ago [-]
It's relevant for all humanity.
Not relevant only for those that have lost theirs.
Nice try Zionist drone.
mupuff1234 3 hours ago [-]
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lingrush4 3 hours ago [-]
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kazinator 4 hours ago [-]
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culi 60 minutes ago [-]
Read the article. This is an incredible feat of science and technology. The "forensic architecture" done here uses genuinely innovative and groundbreaking technologies and techniques. Even if you somehow have no sympathy for the conflict it is undeniably fascinating work
mhb 3 hours ago [-]
That battle's been fought and lost. The moderators' suggestion, which I recommend, is to email the moderators.
simianparrot 3 hours ago [-]
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myth_drannon 3 hours ago [-]
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amcoastal 3 hours ago [-]
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kharak 12 hours ago [-]
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mapt 12 hours ago [-]
Echolocation based on audio from a cell phone video, with the reports echoing off flat walls in the area, establishes 3D troop movement during the massacre, and the eventual close-range executions. Including of the person whose cell phone it was.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
12 hours ago [-]
aa-jv 12 hours ago [-]
There are plenty of people on HN who are active in protecting human rights, and this particular incident is a clear example of the amount of work still left to do in the world by those of us who care about each other more than we cling to national identities - especially those national identities with a long track record of human rights violations.
jquery 12 hours ago [-]
Hacker News is not solely news about hacking. "On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."
wtfwhateven 10 hours ago [-]
you cannot be serious. wtf?
magic_hamster 3 hours ago [-]
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NurembergDfens 13 hours ago [-]
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jayquery 5 hours ago [-]
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_zachs 5 hours ago [-]
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ceejayoz 5 hours ago [-]
Oh, come on.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
yosamino 2 hours ago [-]
> Hamas murdering their own citizens again
A good test of whether claim like this is true is to swap out the actor and put in "the Jews"
Like this:
> The Jews murdering their own citizens again
Suddenly it sounds like an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
And the reason why that works, is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews, for stupid reasons they just ended up as the victim of it.
What it does do, is expose antisemitic thinking, which is, in the end, really just concentrated anti-human thinking.
So if I was you, I would start examining how I construct argument and critically evaluate information I come across.
tovej 5 hours ago [-]
That's literally the opposite of how the media game around this genocide has played out. And Forensic Architecture has proven to be a reliable source thoughout the conflict.
estearum 5 hours ago [-]
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dang 5 hours ago [-]
Please don't cross into personal attack, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
People are tired of the endless violations to every single right a human has.
I dont like it either and i didnt like back when it wasnt trendy to not like it. But it isnt pointless. They know what they are about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Peace_Initiative
At some point it becomes obvious that Israel (under the current government and political climate) doesn't want peace.
Read that and tell me that Israel is acting proportionally...
I think it’s become pretty apparent that they would not face any repercussions and might even be rewarded.
Animals. To think we pay for and support this.
From Palestine I want to send you all the best wishes for freedom in Iran. It's time.
And to my Jewish sisters and brothers and siblings in general I want to send a wish for for freedom and end of this stupid hatred..
There is not actually a good reason for all this violence.
All the hospitals are now rubble, and the IDF quietly let it slip that the death toll is legit recently. https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2026-01-29/ty-article/.p...
There's damning video of this specific incident, recovered from the dead. I suspect subsequent massacres made a policy of finding and destroying all the phones. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
So there's zero link whatsoever between Hamas executing 1200 civilians on Oct 7th, taking 200 hostages, and the following war (and war crimes) of Israel?
Israel literally unilaterally began a war and committed war crimes without any act of aggression?
And from the moment 200 hostages had been taken, many of whom died in captivity, everything was carved in stone and no matter what Hamas did, Israel was going anyway to war and to commit war crimes?
Or did something happen on Oct 7th that triggered all this?
Hospitals may have been used for retaliation [0], but it is unclear how many & in what capacity (according to accepted conventions, using a hospital to treat wounded combatants wouldn't make it a valid military target, for example; but hiding weapons or personnel would).
[0] One such recent report: https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/...
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/30/israel-forces-...
Hmm.
> It is prohibited to kill, injure or capture an adversary by resort to perfidy… The following acts are examples of perfidy… The feigning of civilian, non-combatant status...
(Assassinating a paralyzed patient in a hospital is also not typically - ahem - kosher. Even if you're in uniform!)
Could you clarify where in the Geneva Conventions this very important exemption is stated?
> Why was it decided that feigning of civilian, non-combatant status is bad?
Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
The spirit of the law is more important then its letter. Also I think Israel never signed that part of the Geneva Conventions.
> Because people start shooting civilians thinking they're infiltrators, and even enemy civilians are protected persons.
When did that happened in the Israel-Arab conflict? (When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?)
You, earlier: "A lot of that ambiguity would vanish if Hamas did not have a habit of not putting uniforms in combat."
Now it's suddenly not a problem? I can't imagine Hamas signed the Geneva Conventions.
> It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
German Jews in the 1930s/1940s would probably disagree.
> When did that happened elsewhere? It sounds like it should be very rare, people don't kill their own so easily?
I mean, the IDF killed three Israeli hostages in Gaza, while with their hands up and holding a white flag, because they thought they were infiltrators.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67745092
They should also pay reparations, and send their leaders to the Hague.
And how do you even know how many active combatants have been hit? Hamas does not release such numbers, just pretends everyone is a civilian. The closest we have to a list of dead combatants is the Israeli list that leaked--but that's inherently quite an undercount as it's a list of those both identified as dead and identified as members of a terrorist group.
And note that "journalist" and "Hamas" are not exclusive. The majority of the "journalists" have been identified as members of terrorist organizations. They call their propaganda people "journalists". And how about that Al Jazzera reporter discovered holding one of the hostages?
And reports basically conflate "armed man" and "Hamas" as they are pretty much one in the same. (Other than "Hamas" actually includes allied terror organizations.) Think Hamas tolerates opposition in Gaza??
And "Hamas-run Interior Ministry" is accurate. It's admitting the figures are basically enemy propaganda.
From the article we're discussing:
"The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident."
I would describe that as a walk-back.
I guess we're in agreement that Reuters isn't engaging with the topic neutrally.
Idk. if this is happening here but given how some threads devolved and other patterns common for such people emerged (red hearing arguments, false conclusions etc.) it looks quite a bit like it.
This kind people (the also tend to argue endlessly not based on common sense, understanding of the real world and empathy (in questions of ethic/moral) but based on nit picking stuff like as if the word ist just a game you find holes in the rules with to "cleverly win". Because for them the world often is just that.
But a lot of people find such behavior deeply deplorable. hence why if something looks like that it will get a lot of down votes even if it wasn't meant that way.
---
(1): Non intellectual people try that too. But they tend to lack the skill to pull it off. Hence why it tends to be pretty obvious why they are down voted or similar.
(2): Non evil people do that too, they just normally have the decency not to do so with topics like genocide. I also use evil here as a over-generalization but I have mostly seen that behavior with neo-nazis and other groups which are least fascist adjacent (and most times outright fascist).
IMO, Israel stepped very clearly over the line, repeatedly, in how they handled it, but the parent post is a pretty reasonable summary of the considerations.
Please don't create accounts to break HN's rules with.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/nov/17/can-hospitals-...
> Article 8 of the Rome statute, which established the international criminal court (ICC) in The Hague, defines a long list of war crimes including “intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, historic monuments, hospitals and places where the sick and wounded are collected”.
> But it makes an exception if the targets are “military objectives”. Philip-Gay said that “if a civilian hospital is used for acts harmful to the enemy, that is the legal term used”, the hospital can lose its protected status under international law and be considered a legitimate target. Nevertheless, if there is doubt as to whether a hospital is a military objective or being used for acts harmful to the enemy, the presumption, under international humanitarian law, is that it is not.
Again, I think Israel committed war crimes here and throughout Gaza. But the parent poster has a point that using a hospital for combat purposes risks its status.
(There are still rules to follow in that case, that weren't followed. Again, war crimes.)
> Truth: Mass-destroying a country's hospitals, murdering the doctors, nurses, workers & patients, mass-executing aid workers ... is Israeli. And only Israeli.
This is the same mistake many made about Nazi Germany; convincing themselves that the Germans were uniquely evil. It stops people from having to examine themselves.
I think this is one of the ugliest things about this particular war. While the IDF unquestionably committed various war crimes over the course of the conflict anyway, the bulk of what people found objectionable very well might have been done in total accordance with international law. Despite many failures and excesses, the IDF at least paid lip service to trying to do that, as a policy.
It's just that, the reality is, the rules are based on entirely different assumptions about how war is carried out. If they might lead to something resembling a "humane" war (hah!) when fought between, say, a relatively evenly matched France and Germany, they're quite ineffective at preventing a humanitarian catastrophe when you have a modern force attempting to siege an ultra-dense, militarized enclave run by an organization with no real hope of a conventional victory or interest in the well-being of its civilians.
And so you end up with this absurd situation where the world witnessed, over and over again, unimaginably horrible things being inflicted on the population of Gaza, and the Israelis responding - if we're being charitable, not entirely unreasonably - "Why are you getting mad at us? We're following the rules!"
It's just that, clearly, the rules are insufficient to match people's moral sentiments.
I think this is somewhat out of touch, the main reason this conflict has garnered so much attention is the amount of times Isreal commits war crimes.
No.
This is asymmetrical warfare
The only route Israel has to victory, now, is genocide. They need to stop and make peace before they earn a place with Pol Pot and Stalin as genociders
Certainly no one's donating Patriot batteries and F-16s to Gaza.
(I'm also not sure I'd consider the Russia/Ukraine war to be… undercovered in the press.)
https://www.ajc.org/news/what-every-american-should-know-abo...
If you think that the main intention of Israel is other than push those million of people that bother them out (or kill them if they don't go), I have a bridge to sell you.
Hell, they even say that themselves. Go to listen to their politicians.
By the way, if you are an European Union citizen, there is request to the commission to stop the EU-Israel commercial agreement. You can sign it here:
https://eci.ec.europa.eu/055/public/#/screen/home
Yes. But.
Those are weasel words. The correct, honest word, is genocide
You seriously need to educate yourself about history, what the nazis did, and what is going on in the middle east, because only a person who has absolutely no idea about either of these subjects could draw this terrible comparison. Unless, of course, you're just interested in spreading disinformation bordering on blood libel.
Who accepted those? And did they have a right to do so on behalf of _all_ of humanity?
The conventions are a guideline. To use them as a blanket moral justification for your actions after the fact is extremely disingenuous.
You know who reminds me of that? Fucking Serbia and they got bombed for it.
Can we not politicize historical events? This is not historically controversial. The Czechoslovak President literally called it the "final solution" to their German problem. Or do you just want more examples? There are plenty.
It's sort of understandable why the defenders of the genocide have to keep defending it. Stopping doing so today would mean admitting that until yesterday you've been defending utter inhumanity.
A review:
> Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing is a challenging documentary. It is not only difficult to watch, but it also probes into one of the most grotesque aspects of human nature: the capacity for self-delusion in the face of horrific atrocities. This isn’t a film about history, facts, or statistics; it’s about the memories of the men who killed, the stories they tell themselves, and how they continue to live with the horrors they’ve inflicted on others. The film’s power lies in its ability to take the viewer beyond a surface-level understanding of evil and into the psychological abyss of those who have committed atrocities—and seemingly moved on with their lives.
From: https://docthisway.com/2024/09/23/the-act-of-killing-review/
For whatever reason YouTube has put age limits on some of the uploads of it, here's the start of one without it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj9Zw5fN3rE
They're hardly the only ones reporting this.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/30/middleeast/israeli-military-g...
> Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth quoted military officials Thursday as saying, “We estimate that about 70,000 Gazans were killed in the war, not including the missing.” Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT) and said there is now an effort to analyze how many of those killed were civilian or militant.
And the IDF ain't contesting it:
> “The IDF clarifies that the details published do not reflect official IDF data,” the spokesperson said. “Any publication or report on this matter will be released through official and orderly channels.” The spokesperson did not answer if the IDF held data about the number of Palestinians killed in Gaza or if such information would ever be released.
2. Links to a news report that has literally no source on its claims. Just says "IDF accepted" and that's it.
3. Links to another news report which does nothing but report on the previous news report as if this makes it credible.
4. Says IDF isn't contesting the report.
5. Proceeds to provide the only official, verifiable, sourced IDF quote about the report, contesting it.
The logical fallacies you're willing to accept in order to feed your hatred is impressive.
2. "Kan 11, the country’s public broadcaster, attributed the information to the Coordinator of Government Affairs in the Territories (COGAT)"
(That's a state-owned news outlet, to be clear; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kan_11)
3. See above.
4. Accurate.
5. Re-read that statement. At no point does it contest the toll.
The official quote clearly states "the details do not reflect official data". If you see it as "no contest" we're gonna have to chalk it up to cultural differences in parsing language.
Officially, Israel has no nuclear weapons. (lol)
The IDF is most welcome to publish a claim and have it dissected. I would remind you we're on a thread where their "official data" fell apart because of direct video evidence of their war crimes obtained from their dead victims' phones.
There was more than "a" hospital. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
Are the satellites lying, too? https://www.nbcnews.com/world/gaza/satellite-images-destruct...
Today they still spit to the side when having to say the name George Bush or Tony Blair, among others.
You either weren't there, have a bad memory, are watching typically mainstream new sources, or are willfully ignoring the voices that are having that conversation today.
Many of the ills today can be traced back to powers grabbed at the time to assist that so-called "war on terror".
While you have a valid point overall, I always hate this specific phrasing because it's either ignorant of history or implies there is a statute of limitations on being indigenous. And if it is the latter, you're actively being counterproductive to the cause because that is telling the Israelis that the land will be morally theirs if they can hold it for enough generations thereby encouraging continued occupation.
Is there not? I’m pretty sure every tribe that’s considered indigenous now at any place has replaced some other group that lived there before them.
* https://mgnsw.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/map_col_high...
* https://www.abc.net.au/news/science/2016-09-22/world-first-s...
This recent genetic based view replaces the "gut feeling" view akin to yours that was long pushed by Quadrant et al.
Read article, chase up the papers, evidence says "no".
The Tasmanians and the Noongars (Southern most to east, southern most to west) have genetically been in place a long time and had no one to replace.
The article mentions "genetic diversity" between east, west, centre, north, south, etc - that comes from not mixing.
"But surely..." <-- gut feelings? You should joinn Quadrant.
> If a tribe moved from southern Australia to the north and replaced another tribe
Do you have any evidence of that?
> who gets the land now?
There's a wealth of material on Mabo, Land rights, Native title, et al that address all that - if you're generally curious it's there to read.
eg: starting with, say https://aiatsis.gov.au/explore/mabo-case
Otherwise, how would you decide who gets which part of the world?
US big brother will make sure to protect its little “older” brother. Hilarious as it sounds.
Why did it quickly grow?
For an exactly same "military action with no planning but a lot of bravado" scenario see Russia's invasion into Ukraine.
Netanyahu is on the record funnelling money through Qatar. He said it was for "humanitarian aid" - which would be more credible if it wasn't such an extraordinary and unusual outbreak of concern for Palestinian wellbeing.
The occupation is straight out genocide, labelled as such by many Israeli scholars, as well as most of Rest of World.
This level of barbarism and entitlement has no place on a civilised planet.
Target a music festival with no military value: terrorism.
Blow up a building because hamas has a tunnel under there: not terrorism. If the military value gained is disproportionate to the civilian cost, it is a war crime. But still not terrorism.
Not disagreeing with the definition but this is what both sides have been doing.
Look, blowing up aid workers, which is in question in this article, is also terrorism. Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist. Also if you you use your definition for what Israel has been doing in the last 70-80 years it makes them terrorists as well, the word is simply meaningless at this point.
> Killing unarmed civilians, kids, etc is also terrorist.
The vast majority of lethal force actions in Gaza are targeting Hamas operations. Civilians getting killed by those strikes is NOT terrorism.
> - Israel's response was hasty, unplanned, purely driven by emotion at the beginning, and it quickly grew beyond any reason in the next weeks.
This is also an extreme understatement. It's literally a genocide.
> The Israel Defense Forces believes that the Hamas-run health ministry’s death toll from the war in the Gaza Strip has been largely accurate, a senior Israeli military official acknowledged on Thursday.
https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
IDF claims 2/3 to 3/4 of killed are civilians. Now add in that around half of the population of Gaza is under 18 and also that half the population is female.
I know that I will not convince you, you are a person who thinks "lol" is adequate terminology when discussing the killing of humans, but you also don't get to lie about things on the internet that even the party you support does not lie about.
Please try and adhere to the standard of conversation that all of us on HN are trying have to elevate our discussion. Read it here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
You’re being generous. There’s zero chance Israel didn’t know it’d happen and it let it happen anyway. The one country which all but brags about tying off loose ends.
I believe hospitals lose much of their protection under international law when they’re dual used like this. (There is still proportionality and morality.)
For some reason people forget the pearl harbour event that happened before it all kicked off ?
Not trying to say it’s fine to bomb a hospital, but it doesn’t seem fair to single out the IDF. Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
In the PNW there is also plenty of discussion in public school about the shame of Japanese internment camps in the US.
As others have pointed out "The War on Terror" has been nearly constantly criticized by Americans since it's inception. Mocking it on the Daily Show was a fairly common theme even 20 years ago.
It's been awhile since I've been in high school, but even back then standard public education was to discuss the topic very respectfully and to question the mainstream narrative that "more lives were saved because of it". It's not uncommon for US High Schools recommend Barefoot Gen as a supplemental reading on the subject. Americans largely feel complicated about Hiroshima and absolutely do not view strong critique of it as "whining".
So yeah, I'm sure many people in Israel have a complicated view of the events that happened post October 7 too. Yet people will mostly ignore all of that and go completely out of their way to criticize basically everything Israel has done.
I'm quite partial to it all, I just hate the hypocrisy.
I don't disagree.
There's a reason we have a thing called "war crimes". (In fact, much of the concept stems from a conflict very significant to Israel.)
> I heard almost no one complain about the “war on terror”
I don't think you were listening very hard.
> Do you whine about Hiroshima ?
If we did it today, with F-35s and precision weaponry and drones available to us? Absolutely.
I saw Israel using very precision weapons too. Warning people to leave areas etc. I even saw "live leak" style videos where people in Gaza were filming buildings because they knew precisely when they'd be demolished.
None of that was good enough though, clearly...war sucks, best to avoid starting one in the first place if you care about the welfare of others...people can say the IDF did all the wrong things, and you could also say it was stupidly reckless of Hamas.
For those people who are really unhappy with the IDF, also need to be eqaually unhappy with Hamas, else nothing will improve for the innocent people of the region.
I would suggest that fairly indiscriminate use of precision weapons isn't quite what I'm referring to.
This must be the definition of pedantry. The point is *Israel deliberately destroyed an unconscionable number of hospitals, killing enormous amounts of real-life civilian people, actual humans like you and I. People with daughters, husbands, friends, people who were just as valuable as anyone else.
And let's look at the numbers. Hamas numbers are fantasy but let's pretend they're accurate. ~70k. I have not seen anyone contesting the Israeli database being combatants. ~9k. Note that even granting the most extreme claims this is still better than what western powers typically do--and it's in an unevacuated urban environment which is the worst case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attacks_on_health_facilities_d...
"By February 2024, it was reported that "every hospital in Gaza is either damaged, destroyed, or out of service due to lack of fuel.""
> And it's irrelevant anyway as hospitals lose their protected status when used for military purposes.
A lie.
https://www.icrc.org/en/document/protection-hospitals-during...
"Even then, humanitarian considerations relating to the welfare of the wounded and sick being cared for in the facility may not be disregarded. They must be spared and, as far as possible, active measures for their safety taken."
"Notably, an attacking party remains bound by the principle of proportionality. The military advantage likely to be gained from attacking medical establishments or units that have lost their protected status should be carefully weighed against the humanitarian consequences likely to result from the damage or destruction caused to those facilities: such an attack may have significant incidental second- and third-order effects on the delivery of health care in the short, middle and long-term."
> All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things, not to things pretending to be civilian.
This is an outright lie.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions
"The First Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded field soldiers, the Second Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of sick and wounded sailors, the Third Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of prisoners of war, and the Fourth Geneva Convention addresses the treatment of civilians during armed conflict"
> Your video is paywalled but also irrelevant as it shows emergency symbols
That is precisely why it is relevant. Israel's initial claim was that they didn't have any.
From the article we're discussing:
"After footage from Radwan’s phone was first published by the New York Times a few days later, the Israeli military backtracked on its claims that the vehicles did not have emergency signals on when Israeli troops opened fire, saying the statement was inaccurate."
"The Israeli military then announced on April 20 that an internal inquiry into the incident had found the killings were caused by “several professional failures, breaches of orders, and a failure to fully report the incident.”"
Why do you say it's a lie that they lose their protected status? Read what Geneva actually says.
And I note yet another reference to "proportionality" as if it's some magic spell. Such usages imply the actions are not proportionate--but that is never actually addressed. Underwear gnome logic.
Citing chapters in Geneva is not a rebuttal. "Geneva" is yet another magic spell. I'm reminded of the repeated denials by Hamas of bunkers under the main hospital. And Israel came out and said there's no question they exist as we built them. Israel is very big on civil defense.
Night, not illuminated. And note that your summary of Israel's conclusions does not say whether the people actually were non-combatants.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_blockade_of_the_Gaza_S...
> Night, not illuminated.
The red/blue emergency lights (and headlights) are visibly illuminated in the video.
That the Geneva Conventions cover more than civilians is... not tough to back up. https://ihl-databases.icrc.org/en/ihl-treaties/gciii-1949
Again, the claim upthread: "All the Geneva protections apply only to truly civilian things..."
Accurate, or not?
The issue is Israel state is far removed from the teachings of Moses and out to exterminate Muslims in the middle east. So naturally you can expect violent resistance.
> That’s Hezbollah, Hamas…
Sleight of hand happening here.
Support for Hamas itself is waning in Gaza due to their brutality, but Hamas began the war with broad support for their genocidal aims.
You can't really criticize people to support the only org that pretend to care about them while the whole world seem to be against their own existence. Most palestinians would just want to live a peaceful normal life but have been expropriated and forced to live in a ghetto. How convenient to feign surprise and indignation that same people would have resentment against those that have been making their life difficult and at risk. Israel created Hamas.
You can draw a parallel to say, part of the colombian population that was supporting Pablo Escobar when the Medellin cartel was providing services that the government was failing to provide to the poorest classes.
This sounds like: "You make sure to avoid mentioning that the Nazis are not just a genocidal army of aggression, intent on genociding Jews and taking over Europe. They are also an administrative body that bla bla bla"
I wasn't simply saying that there was broad support for Hamas among gazan civilians, I was saying there was broad support for the destruction of Israel and the crimes against humanity that Hamas, along with a broad contingent of Gazan civilians, perpetrated on civilians on October 7.
What Israel government and IDF has been doing is an insult to the shoah victims. Any half decent jew should condemn the likoud.
My grandmother is a living Auschwitz survivor (one of the last, she's nearly 100). I'll let her decide what she thinks is an insult to Shoah victims.
I'm simply refuting your earlier claim that only Hamas and Hezbollah is dedicated to the destruction of Israel, while regular Palestinians are fine with it. Hopefully you have the intellectual honesty to acknowledge your earlier claim was wrong, and there was and is indeed broad support for destroying Israel and its civilian population among Palestinian civilians. And not just intellectual support, but concrete actions. Are you familiar with the "pay for slay" program?
It's not like the other side is peaceful and wants to make love and fight war. Israel has been violently kicking out Palestinians from their lands for the past 70-80 years. Before that, among 'Palestinians' there were Muslims, Jews, Christians and other religions coexisting just fine. The ambition to create an ethnic state of Jews only gave rise to misery for everyone and only grew the the intrareligious hate. They could have taken a different path and give us all, the rest of the world a break.
Hamas and friends understand this and rely on western morality to protect them from complete annihilation. They may have miscalculated how often you could kick the dog before it bit back.
This, of course, cuts both ways.
No such claim was made.
Other papers back up the statement. https://www.timesofisrael.com/idf-believes-70000-gazans-kill...
> Deliberately hiding in buildings and institutions that are supposed to be strictly civilian.
Yes, this is not allowed.
The rules of law still say you can’t do whatever you like as a result.
An oddly specific claim. Hamas hasn't killed any Israeli with a turtle, either.
I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
Israel has also not fired any missiles at hospitals, with one exception (a small diameter bomb aimed specifically at Hamas that caused minimal damage).
> I'm not sure why destroying hospitals with tanks, missiles, and sappers is better than "aerial bombs". Could you elaborate?
I don't blame you for making these mistakes, as the information space is poisoned, but if you're interested in being correct rather than ideological you owe it to yourself to (at bare minimum) show me (and yourself) which Gaza hospital has been reduced to rubble.
In terms of "sappers" it is true that Israel has sent special forces into hospitals with confirmed Hamas presence, but that is very different from "bombing and leveling hospitals," an alluring but ultimately false claim.
This is all occurring against a backdrop in which Hamas has weaponized hospitals. For example, they brought Israeli hostages to Gaza hospitals. They have killed an Israeli hostage in a Gaza hospital (and sent video to the family of the slain hostage). They have built tunnels under hospitals. They shoot from hospitals. They meet in hospitals. etc.
Palestinians have been under this assault by Israel and Zionists in general for nearly a century. Defending anything Israel does at this point is indefensible. Their context has ALWAYS been wrong and they've been caught lying so many times it's more accurate to believe exactly the opposite of anything the IDF says.
If you make claims, you should be able to back them up.
Stop defending the murder of children in hospitals.
Stop denying a genocide.
You wish there were an actual genocide, because you care more about portraying Israel as evil than you do the lives of Palestinian civilians. This is why you make one up. But good news for you: you've been infected by a curable mind virus, what the physicist David Deutsch calls "The Pattern."
Damn…
- Likud is an evil political party
- Natanyahu is a wanted war criminal
- IDF committed many atrocities
- Hamas was insane to think that Bibi would NOT BOMB the Gaza in retaliation.
- Hamas was the first to cast the stone.
- Israel ALWAYS gonna retaliate with non proportional force when it comes to security of its citizens.
Palestine is a country under a brutal military occupation and progressive illegal colonisation that has been going on for 80 years. Before October 7, Israel had already killed many, many more civilians in Gaza than Hamas did in Israel with that attack.
Uhg, too bad its not taught in school coz history is written by winners and you have to search for it yourself.
Yes Israel commits an ongoing genocide.
And I look at this only by lens of history.
But following their conclusion: the thing that makes you a country is being recognized as one by other countries. Most of the world recognizes Palestine as a country (including 157 UN member states). Here is a map where the green countries recognize Palestine, and grey do not: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/08/Palestin...
My theory is that they knew this would happen and they did it because they knew it would garner support (which it did) and they also knew they had nothing to lose because this is what would have happened in the long-term anyway. They chose between a quick death and a slow death. Unfortunately, everyone else who originally chose them to protect them didn't get to choose. I doubt most would have voted for this if they had that choice.
You can't just stamp out a guerilla resistance the way Israel have tried to do. I suspect Hamas reckoned that a well-timed short term sacrifice would turn global opinion against Israel.
So what did they really lost? Do they even care that some Europeans don't like them ? Europeans are not the one who sell them 99% of their weapons.
Yes, US is supporting them to. They are losing from both sides, though. They may have part of the remaining generation in power and that's it.
Witness Tucker Carlson dismantling Huckabee, and Zionist ideology, recently.
Where it ends up, no one knows. But this is different.
I highly recommend to watch the Oscar winning movie “no other land”, for anyone that thinks that Israel would just let them leave in peace
Also it is a two way street, there is also a problem of Palestinian settlers, which while I do want to highlight is separate and in no way justifies the Israeli ones, is still a real problem and harnesses a lot of bad publicity when Israel destroys said illegal settlements.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht
As for Palestinian settlers, where would those even be?
That is ignoring many decades of history.
To have a useful and productive discussion about the modern conflict, it's pretty obvious that we don't need to go back to Jacob and Esau, but to "Zionism" and it's enabler "European - specifically British and French - colonialism."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
alternative FE: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=bfD1y7WZLpM
The case seems pretty clear, especially since the soldiers tried to hide all evidence.
Even if the 'soldiers' didn't, it wouldn't have mattered as the governing apparatus usually goes out of its way to protect their own militants.
Ex A:
https://www.counterfire.org/article/cold-blooded-murder-and-...However, you are also correct, the IDF has little or no accountability for criminal behavior.
May be the brazenness is why they make the best Tech CXOs?
War, of course, can not be prosecuted any other way. It is not police work, the artillery man, fighter jet pilot and indeed the simple infantry is routinely going to shoot at what they can not see and do not independently confirm. There is no crime in that.
>A digital reconstruction of the scene shows that the soldiers would have had an uninterrupted view of the arrival of the convoy.
>The reconstruction was jointly achieved with the two survivors of the incident, with an immersive spatial model they could walk through and amend. Together with spatial and audio analysis we established the position of the soldiers on an elevated ground with an unobstructed line of sight to the emergency vehicles.
Their reconstruction of the Beirut Port explosion was incredible though: https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/beirut-port-...
Not sure if they're still fêted as artists or have moved away from that label. I still find their approach completely mesmerizing nevertheless.
And the satellite photos showing the scene, and the cell phone video showing the shooting...
> The report by Earshot and Forensic Architecture reconstructs, minute by minute, how the massacre unfolded. Using video and audio recordings from the incident[1], open-source images and videos[2], satellite imagery[3], social media posts[4], and other materials[5], as well as in-depth interviews with two survivors of the attack[6], the groups were able to digitally reconstruct the scene and events surrounding the massacre.
So out of multiple "sources", some of which aren't even mentioned ("other materials"?), only the first one is actually from the scene. Sources 2 through 5 are not from the actual scene. The "interviews" are eye witness accounts which are extremely unreliable in this context, especially in a gunfight in the dark.
I don't know. Doesn't seem all that high-tech impressive or even reliable to me. There's also a huge problem with the team conducting this report being consistently biased in their terminology, having team members with titles like "activist", and having researchers from Ramallah and other places who are clearly a side in the conflict.
I will be glad to see a neutral, journalistic research of this incident trying to actually get to the truth and determine if there were hamas militants in the convoy, rather than see some self proclaimed activists play with google maps.
Decide for yourself if the initial Israeli claims that it was an unmarked, unlit convoy check out. Only need to see the first few seconds, if you don't wanna hear all the shooting and dying.
The shooting is on video, and admitted to by the IDF. After a while, when it was dug out of the grave.
Again, the video is available, from the very real publication The New York Times.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not the IDF's fault.
And if it was, they didn't mean it.
And if they did, Gaza deserved it.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, it's actually Israel's fault.
And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And if we did, Israelis deserved it.
Apply to every missile attack from Gaza over the last 15 years.
Look at any photo of any neighborhood in Israel, is there anywhere that remotely looks similar to the pile of rocks that Gaza looks like now?
Universities, hospitals, so much infrastructure, all gone. So much of Gaza is now people living in tents. Israel destroyed so much civilian infrastructure that existed.
How’s that similar to you?
(In this case, I'm of the opinion that both sides committed clear, deliberate war crimes.)
Also, comparing Nazi Germany, a massively powerful industrial state, with a tiny, poor territory under foreign occupation by a vastly superior power is insane.
There was a partial blockade, not a full blockade, and this partial blockade came after Palestinians launched the second intifada. Prior to the october 7 massacre, perpetrated by Hamas and gazan civilians, tens of thousands of gazans were able to travel out of gaza through egypt and israel, where many of them worked. nearly 75,000 truckloads of food and cargo went into gaza from israel in 2022. Gaza exported lots too.
I don't quite see how under those circumstances, they were able to build "a more powerful army than many European countries", unless you talk about Luxembourg or the Vatican.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_the_Gaza_Strip
Yes. Hamas attacks civilians, the IDF attacks Hamas.
Hamas brags even about their failed attacks.
Your comparison fails at the first step.
> And if it was, we didn't mean it.
And this one! How often does Hamas pull the "we didn't mean it!" card for their attacks on Israel? Have they ever? Of course they mean it, they're a bunch of assholes.
Sure but pro Hamas advocates deny everything.
That's rhetorical btw, since your comment was not made in good faith.
You'll notice that posts like these don't have actual, logical discussion underneath and in their stead have repetitive slogan comments.
It was covered by UK media for a short period and they would gloss over the veterans and focus more broadly on WCK, there is lots of examples of UK media weird coverage like this which no doubt was intentional. It was also barely spoken about by UK politicians
RIP John Chapman, James Henderson, and James Kirby.
On the tech side I’m wondering if any LLMs were used for the investigation, they don't seem to mention any by name at least.
That is a LOT of shooting.
A normal mag holds 30 rounds, that's 30 full magazines worth of bullets they dumped into these people.
They were really trying to make sure there were no survivors.
What should be done with it?
On the other side there was the famous "hospital bombing" news event early in the war where it was claimed that 500 people were killed, and then within a couple of hours it became obvious that the explosion was caused by a misfiring Hamas rocket, with video from multiple angles of the failure, that it hit an empty parking lot in front of the hospital and only blew out the windows and burnt a few cars, and that no more than a handful of people had been killed.
And also the repeated claims that Israel were lying about the tunnels under Gaza Hospitals, and make videos of one such strike (a bunker buster penetrating the parking lot just outside the entrance) go viral, only for Hamas to later announce that one of the replacement leaders for Sinwar had been killed in that strike, and for excavation to find the bunkers / tunnel network underneath that very hospital.
As well as, earlier in the war, a Hamas bunker w/ data center equipment directly underneath the UNRWA HQ in Gaza.
None of that justifies genuine instances of war crimes and atrocities that Israel may have committed, but there's a reason why people tune out some of the extreme claims that fly around.
I already said I don't condone any instances of legitimate war crimes. I don't think enumerating everything that has ever happened by either side is very useful. But it's a fact that both sides lie flagrantly about atrocities. Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
If you want me to start listing some BS that Israel has done, fine - the calendar stunt was ridiculous (if you have followed the conflict, you probably have heard of it). What goes on in the west bank is disgraceful. There are plenty of statements by Israeli politicians that are basically genocidal language (though you can play that game with most countries, random US politicians say psychotic shit all the time).
Reuters was given an IDF escort as they were walked through the tunnel system, during which a room with some servers was called a Hamas data centre, and they nodded along. That's not quite the same thing.
>Lots of the footage in the early days of the war that was claimed to be from Gaza was actually recycled from the Syrian civil war.
Lots of footage that Hamas or advocates for Palestine released or Twitter randos? Not all of those things are equivalent to Israel making a claim.
This is an Israeli lie. Not only has Israel bombed all of the hospitals, they murdered an entire NICU of infants. I can't believe people are still trying to justify blowing up hospitals!
And yet one side is committing genocide.
One side is governed by a death cult for sure, if you look at how many children they indiscriminately kill.
Are you referring to the jewish israelis by "death cult"?
That’s really the problem, innit? Palestine can’t stop poking, Israel overreact. 20 GOTO 10.
If genocide were the goal this war would have lasted one day.
Collective punishment, or a long term ethnic cleansing would be much more accurate, but you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
There's no comparison at all to the ease with which Israel could just drop a couple of bombs on Gaza, had it decided to do so.
You can't infer intent that way. Nuking Gaza isn't free, it would introduce an existential threat to Israel. They are toeing a dangerous line already, and using WMDs would align other countries against them really quickly.
Putin isn't avoiding using nukes on Ukraine because he's a nice guy.
or, maybe because they came to the conclusion that the repercussions on the world stage of even more horrific media coming out of Gaza is too steep of a price to pay.
i don't know which, but i do know it is naive to conclude that because they COULD end the war in a day and did not, they are driven by morality and ethical concerns rather than pragmatic ones.
Israel has always said it doesn't have nuclear weapons. They would have absolutely zero sympathy going forward from any major nation if they decided to drop a nuclear bomb on Gaza, and they want that land so rendering that land uninhabitable might not be a good idea.
Curious how that goes, especially since Israels ulterior motives are always implied, they're not taken by their word.
And Islamists, who share their motives openly with anyone willing to listen are ignored.
Anyone who seriously speaks words 'nuclear weapon' and 'gaza' together is basically admitting he has 0 clue about the situation and is uninformed larper for either side.
The term "genocide" noes not mean "kill every single member of a group", it refers to the destruction of the group itself by whatever means.
> you’re just repeating what you read unthinkingly if you say genocide.
Your policy of deeming everybody who does not have the same opinion as you to be too stupid, is smug, self serving and lazy.
See, I could just also go ahead and tell you that you are too "unthinkingly" to know that "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for "genocide" and that "long term ethnic cleansing" is exactly congruent in meaning with "genocide" (look it up).
Instead of doing that, I would like you to consider that when I say that the state of Israel is committing a genocide against the Palestinian people, I have thought long and hard about whether that is the appropriate term, and without taking it lightly, I have for myself concluded that that is actually the correct term.
It’s literally happening in Ukraine and, to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis. On the other hand, there are conflicts across Africa and Asia which are not receiving half the attention.
Because the West doesn't fund and shield the perpetrators unlike Israel.
You could make an at least passable argument that the US offers a favorable media environment to our MENA allies (i.e., those other than Israel) during what is by all accounts an extremely brutal and mostly ignored conflict in Sudan.
Sure. Though Western arms absolutely play heavily in Sudan and across South America. My point is it’s odd to single out Gaza as a case where the West doesn’t care. It’s more that it uniquely has folks in the West who care strongly about both sides.
Who do you think supplies the weapons to most of the world's conflicts? They just appear out of thin air?
There is nothing obviously true about that statement.
America has global force projection power. It has about as much influence in Gaza as it does in e.g. Venezuela or even, arguably, Iran.
Everyone has good reasons for why their pet war is the most central to our interests. I think it’s fair to accept that there are multiple good answers.
Ukraine isn't part of the West.
> to a lesser scale but precisely the same in type, Minneapolis
What was happening in Minneapolis is not only much smaller in scale than what's happening in Palestine, it's also just a completely different thing.
Its information warfare using the issue as a proxy to attack and undermine western democracy.
"fun" fact: more journalists died in the Gaza than in every conflict since ww2 combined.
Being a journalist typically provides you some protection in times of war, but for journalists who are part of a group suffering genocide, it's a liability.
Plus because Israel is making serious efforts to choke off all information from the region, I understand that it takes some time before a sober accounting of an incident like this reaches the outside world. To avoid the charged rhetoric I have waited. Yet the point blank executions of humanitarian workers is still shocking to me. Such reckless hate, it must destroy a person.
By being good guys, you surely mean by being white guys colonizing a territory, exproprating previous land owners and bringing death and despair all around them. Sounds right, that is the history of white colonization.
That's a baffling claim.
Israelis emphatically not being "the good guys in this story" is a very mainstream (though not necessarily majority) view in every country in the world, possibly with the exception of Israel itself.
Israel has been an apartheid performing ethnic cleansing and a slow genocide during its whole existence.
Cue the citizens that protested to stop the aid trucks from going into Gaza. The citizens that protested because the Israeli military arrested (after a lot of international pressure) soldiers that were caught raping Palestinian prisoners. They were protesting for the right of soldiers to continue to rape.
The people you're talking about are Israel's far-right. I don't think you can index from them onto the median Israeli's political views anymore than you could reasonably index from a member of Hamas's armed wing onto the median Palestinian.
(A recurring theme in both I/P and MENA conflicts more generally is that political minorities - WB settlers in Israel, for example, manage to wield disproportionate power and induce chaos and strife across the region.)
https://electronicintifada.net/content/book-review-how-israe...
I suggest reading Hamas' 2017 charter in full for proper context.
[1]: https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/our-mission-our-values/
This also tracks with my travels to Palestine, friends who have travelled more recently, and various videos and article: the right-left in Israel is quite different to the right-left in other Western nations: namely, if you talk to a leftist Israeli, they will also hold strong view against Palestinians.
This is, critically, a pretty different political position from defending people accused of wartime rape. That doesn't make it a good position, but we shouldn't conflate the two.
As for why: Israelis don't appear to disapprove of a two-state solution any more or less than Palestinians[1]. Both are absolutely committed to the idea that their one-state solution will be supreme.
[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/695582/peace-distant-prospect-i...
They were optimistic!
Looking at the long term history of Israel, the left was more optimistic in general about hopes for peace with the Palestinians, while the right more suspected that Arafat never really wanted peace, and was just being sneaky. But let it be noted that the Prime Minister who ordered the withdrawal from Gaza was right-wing Gen. Ariel Sharon, Likud member and previous advocate of settlements everywhere.
After the actions of Hamas in subsequent years, particularly Oct 7, 2023, that hope and optimism was completely eliminated.
Let's not pretend that the 2005 'withdrawal' was a chance for a fresh start for the Palestinians that they floundered. The various negotiations were very one sided, and the offers were also unacceptable.
> The people I don't agree with are too stupid to understand what they are supporting.
That is lazy thinking, and your claim is unsubstantiated. That doesn't move a discussion towards a better understanding of each other, it fosters division.
Please don't do that.
If you care about the victims, you should also care about the victims at the music festival too. Because they're one and the same, innocent people who were murdered for stupid ideology.
Israel needs to be de-Nazified like they did to the Germans after they were defeated in WW2.
https://www.earshot.ngo/what-we-do/audio-ballistics
https://forensic-architecture.org/
https://content.forensic-architecture.org/wp-content/uploads...
> Earshot used echolocation to analyze the audio on the recordings in order to arrive at precise estimates of the shooters’ locations. Echolocation is the process of locating the source of a sound based on an analysis of the sound’s echoes and the environment in which the sound travels. The Israeli military destroyed and cleared so many buildings in the Tel Al-Sultan area where the ambush of the aid workers took place that very few structures remained. This destruction actually strengthened Earshot’s ability to determine the positions and movements of Israeli soldiers, based on identifying the surfaces responsible for clearly distinguishable gunshot echoes. Rather than having multiple buildings reflecting the sound waves, there were only a few standing walls and the emergency vehicles themselves.
> “Earshot forensically analyzed over 900 gunshots fired at aid workers. It took one whole year of careful listening to reconstruct an auditory picture of what happened that dark night,” Lawrence Abu Hamdan, the director of Earshot, told Drop Site.
I'm not sure how much this was actually necessary to the eventual verdict if this is ever adjudicated, though, if "hiding the evidence" is a factor:
> Following the ambush, Israeli forces crushed all eight vehicles using heavy machinery and attempted to bury them under the sand.
> The body of Anwar al-Attar was found near the ambush site on March 27, and the bodies of the other 14 aid workers, all wearing identifying uniforms or volunteer vests of their respective organizations, were found in a mass grave near the site on March 30.
But the understanding that they were advanced upon in a walking wave of fire, and then the survivors were executed one by one at close range, may help.
This is discernible by watching how long it takes stories like these to reach a flagged state on the new submissions page. It is further evident by watching which comments within those submissions get flagged based upon their upvotes and visibility.
0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44962005
What if they only act once it reaches the front page?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
There are a million places to discuss politics online. If I wanted to discuss politics, I would go to any one of them. Claiming any HN moderator is 'complicit' in atrocities is absurd.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Turn on showdead and you'll find much, much weirder wastes of time here.
I also don't think your read of it as an organic outcome of a post that obviously violates guidelines is the natural conclusion here, I actually think that interpretation strains credulity more. Where I agree is that I don't think moderators are being heavy-handed on issues like this, but I do think high level political events do merit attention at least once in a while and I don't think the HN pattern has been toward oversaturation.
And in terms of things that make this story unique, I think it's the highest standard of specificity I've ever seen in reporting of this kind, it's using impressive technological reconstruction of the scene, it's actually quite unlike typical news reporting on the topic and it's hosted on a platform that was YC-incubated, and I think DropSite News is in an ascendant moment as a major news breaker. There's lots to talk about here imo.
Why wouldn't influence campaigns, we know every big country to be running, target this site? What reason would they have to leave it out from their list? Why not target a major news forum for the more wealthy and connected (predominantly) Americans in tech? This is not an uwu smol bean site anymore and the cost of (undetectably) botting any given site is rapidly approaching cents.
I recommend any hackernews users to check that site frequently, plenty of interesting posts on hackernews that get flagged and hidden daily.
I'm sure he sees the death and displacement of millions as a small price to pay to bring about the Rapture in his lifetime.
https://religiondispatches.org/2025/12/04/mike-huckabee-trie...
A good chunk of them are insanely pro-semitic as well, as they adopt the dual covenant belief that Jews will actually also go to heaven as well as Christians. I've actually never met anyone that adhered to the pro-zionist dispensationalist view that fully thought out the implied consequences, then proceeded to harbor a personal hatred of Jews. The vast majority of them love all things Jewish and hold them in high regard.
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Schrodingers...
Did he qualify it by indicating his claim is based on centuries old religious documents that are not agreed to by any majority of the Earth's population?
1) The entire discussion is a rehashing of the exact same points every time the topic is posted, and not very insightful
2) The participation rate for experts (or even authors) in the discussed field/topic is very low (compared to programming topics)
3) The discussion rarely stays civil and requires excessive moderation
An observation (have no verbatim quote, but believe from dang) is that there is a significant base of "anti-political", otherwise "known-good" HN participants, that flag topics like this preemptively pretty much regardless of perspective and exact topic (presumably for above reasons). You can certainly still blame the flagging on bots or Zionists, but it's almost certainly not only those.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=flags%20off%20turn%20by%3Adang...
We can't, however, turn off flags on threads we don't know about. You guys (I don't mean you personally!) unintentionally assume that we're omniscient. We aren't, so we need people to tell us about cases like this.
In this case, no one told us; I ran across it randomly. Randomness is only good for partial results. For reliable message delivery, someone needs to email hn@ycombinator.com, and please remember that it takes time to work through that (er) rather active inbox.
What is this facade of impartialness and too much politics? Tell that to the people massacred.
I'm always sceptical of this given it doesn't happen to similar posts about Iran.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46599742
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46849715
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46553599
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46839106
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46754132
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46624529
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I also think issues of censorship are very high on the list of topics of interest on HN and few topics are subject to more extensive censorship than reporting on events in Israel and Palestine.
Furthermore, there are handful of accounts who sole purpose seems to be to pump the HN feed full of Israel and Palestine. People who want so badly to talk about a single political topic should probably go to Bluesky.
Framing it as "obsessive" is an attempt to shift away from subject matter toward an attitude of journalists or consumers, like it's borne of the same attitude as paparazzi. But I think it merits significant coverage not for that reason, but because it so frequently meets criteria for meriting journalistic attention.
I agree that comment sections can be bad, but they aren't always, and to some degree I would rather trust moderation than suppress reporting on a topic of legitimate interest. You're exactly right that a lot of reaction is toxic and politicized, and sometimes the way that manifests is by trying to cook up rationales to suppress stories by flagging them. Out of respect for the concern you've identified, it would be a huge mistake to let politicization win by allowing politically motivated abuse of flagging.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
--- original reply ---
If you post like this again we will ban you. There's no place for slurs on this site.
Yes, we apply that equally - I've banned the account that was slurring the opposite group elsewhere in this thread (btw, their comments won't appear to anyone who hasn't turned 'showdead' on in their account). In that case, I didn't post a reply because the account was new and already had a pattern of breaking the site guidelines. In your case, the account is well-established so we wouldn't just go ahead and ban it without replying or warning first.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The poster you are responding to is making ha joke:ish observation (probably badly communicated) that the modus operandi in the Israeli Government is to label all evidence of their crimes "antisemitic" no matter how truthful they are, no matter how many facts, no matter how vile their actions look.
Netanyahu et al have nurtured a context where there is no difference between real antisemitic hate and valid criticism. He and the people like him equate truth to antisemitism. Something which hurts many of us.
Please understand this.
We have to be proactive about moderating anti-semitism on HN—which does appear, unfortunately, though of course not in every comment that someone happens to read that way. There is huge variance in how people interpret these things and we do our best to be charitable. (Also, I had better add that we do our best moderate other types of slur in just the same way.)
Let's assume you're correct. Such a point needs to be expressed thoughtfully and substantively, not snarkily in a way that pattern-matches to a slur. This ought to be clear from the site guidelines: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive." - "Eschew flamebait." - "Don't be snarky." - [etc.]
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As I mentioned above, I was also startled by that post, because the obvious pattern-match was to something nasty.
It‘s not jews committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists. It‘s not muslims or Palestinians planning and executing terrorist attacks, it‘s religious extremists and far right nationalists. When there will be common understanding of this simple truth, fighting the root causes will be much easier.
Because flaggers deem it to be anti-semitic
> committing war crimes in Gaza, it‘s zionists
This is 1) extending responsibility for actions of induviduals to everyone sharing with them ethnicity or religion 2) a display of anti-semitic bigotry
Otherwise it, like most tech heavy investigations, showcase how much useful information there is fly around out there in the air just waiting to be hoovered up - and (althought not the case here) YC funded companies happen to be at the frontlines of such work
We mustn't generalize.
Israel is a state, as they call "democratic", which elected officials who have control to stop these crimes, but not stopping deliberately.
Am I still allowed to ask why the moderators don't want people to read and discuss this particular technology story?
Your question is answered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443, but the short version is that your assumption that we see everything is incorrect.
In case you didn't see them yet, here are some of my other comments in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141678
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141517
Re the concern about flagging, the situation is much as I've described in these past threads: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que.... Specifically, when I looked through who had flagged the current post, I saw the usual coalition between users who appear to be consistently flagging for political reasons, and other users who have quite different flagging patterns than that. In any case, virtually all of the accounts that flagged the thread were established HN users.
Sometimes when people bring this concern up, I go through and make a list of other stories that the same accounts had flagged, to illustrate the point that their flags are not exclusively targeting one specific topic or vector. I've done that here in a collapsed reply, if anyone wants to take a look.
I hope this explanation helps - your posts in this thread seemed to me to be in good faith so I wanted to respond in kind. If you still have a question that my comments and links to past explanations haven't answered, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
The rise and fall of peer review - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47123133 - Feb 2026 (0 comments)
Ladybird adopts Rust, with help from AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47120899 - Feb 2026 (692 comments)
Pope tells priests to use their brains, not AI, to write homilies - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47119210 - Feb 2026 (440 comments)
Music Discovery - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47114672 - Feb 2026 (56 comments)
The 7-Year Bug That Took 3 Minutes to Fix - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47090261 - Feb 2026 (1 comment)
AI made coding more enjoyable - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47075400 - Feb 2026 (97 comments)
RFC 3092 – Etymology of “Foo” (2001) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46934499 - Feb 2026 (52 comments)
Launching My Side Project as a Solo Dev: The Walkthrough - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46845567 - Feb 2026 (9 comments)
There is an AI code review bubble - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46766961 - Jan 2026 (249 comments)
Proof of Corn - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46735511 - Jan 2026 (307 comments)
XLibre XServer 25.1 Changes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46474846 - Jan 2026 (4 comments)
Python Data Science Handbook - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46120611 - Dec 2025 (61 comments)
NTSB Preliminary Report – UPS Boeing MD-11F Crash [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45995834 - Nov 2025 (228 comments)
Best shipping logistic aggregator in India - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45924139 - Nov 2025 (0 comments)
WebDAV isn't dead yet - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45698070 - Oct 2025 (128 comments)
Unicode Footguns in Python - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45689443 - Oct 2025 (20 comments)
AGI is not imminent, and LLMs are not the royal road to getting there - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45627171 - Oct 2025 (124 comments)
Super Ace: Your PH Home for Jili Slots and a 300% Welcome Bonus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45624939 - Oct 2025 (0 comments)
Pkgbase Removes FreeBSD Base System Feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44730021 - July 2025 (42 comments)
It seems that people, even "established HN users" will flag literally anything. Do you feel that there is any remaining article quality signal that can be obtained from the current flagging mechanism?
If you squint and look closely, though, I think you can detect this in the above list. The weirdest "wtf?" cases of flagging are ones where the threads had a lot of comments and were on the frontpage. That means upvotes won the tug-of-war with flags, as they should have in most of those cases.
Conversely, it you look at the submissions in the list which had 0 comments or very few, it looks to me like most were either spam, low-quality articles, or dupes.
Remember, also, that some flags are just mistakes - the link is easy to fat-finger or misclick, and the UI doesn't provide feedback about that. That's likely to change soon as part of work that tomhow and I are planning.
It's a societal-level policy: 47% of Israeli Jews want all Palestinians killed; 82% want all Palestinians forcefully expelled (i.e., ethnically cleansed) [0] which would constitute genocide. 56% want the same for all Israeli Arabs.
So, it's pathetic when Westerners act surprised at Israel's antics: you can't support a genocidal state and then be shocked when it does genocidal stuff. This is just Tuesday for them.
Once you understand this, Israel's actions are not an anomaly. It's the natural expression of people who consider their neighbors beneath them, and barely even human.
[0]: https://www.genocidewatch.com/single-post/poll-show-most-jew...
And look at who is actually committing genocide--basically 100% radical Islam.
Gaza exposed it even more:
* No one accepts high western "morality" anymore
* Most US politicians are blackmailed via Epstein who worked for Israel, with high probability, including Trump
* ICE is just the beginning, they're trained by IDF, send more people and 1940 is not too far away from us
??? Most? His network was certainly extensive but "most politicians" seems like a significantly overextended extrapolation.
Is that an accurate trend on an individual basis?
Even just technologically it's more interesting than 90% of the stuff posted here.
There is a name for people who build coalitions through compromise and diplomacy, and work towards pragmatic solutions to actual problems — they're called "centrists".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_Qatar
Collectively done via Israel's RiseApp and similar.
Redirects set to: talk.politics.misc.
So you don’t think anyone should discuss topics that touch on politics, including this war, on HN?
Easy to make that enemy look bad when you are an impoverished country that has no food, no old people (they were all killed) or modern weapons, that enemy is starving you, killing your women and children, bombing schools and hospitals.....and oh yeah that nation has nuclear weapons.
For example:
> facing an enemy [Hamas] who does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
Imagine the "enemy" in that sentence was not "Hamas", but "The Jews" - that would be a very antisemitic narrative, and in a similar way that antisemitism has nothing really to do with Jews, but rather with antisemites what you are writing here just shows your hatred.
> does everything to get their own people killed
for the purposed of making the killer look bad, is such a naïve take on this. Do you think netanyahu and his cronies care about "looking bad" ? To whom ? That ship has sailed since at least the 90ies.
Your substitution turns a true statement into a false statement; this mechanism is at best meaningless. Yes, making false claims about Jews is antisemitic, but that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
No. Making false claims about Jews is just lying about Jews.
Antisemitism deals in lies, but the defining characteristic of antisemitism is not the lie itself, it's the use of the lie to cast out the Jewish people from the circle of humans to make them into an outsider and threat to humanity itself. The lie is just a tool and it depends on the kind of lie.
> that has no bearing on statements that aren't false.
your assertion here is that the statement in question
> [Hamas] does everything they can to get their own people killed to make you look bad
is true and not false.
What you are claiming it that Hamas is breaking a very fundamental rule of being human, in that they not only don't care about their own being killed but that they "do everything they can to get their own people killed."
Which is a standard propaganda tactic to assigning to you enemy the most depraved characteristics to convince your side that the enemy is not even really fully human.
It's a transparent and stupid tactic, and it begets hatred.
I recall some time ago an Israeli strike--they hit with a roof knocker, Hamas responded by ordering the neighbors to rush to the roof. Too slow, the house was packed with people when the bomb fell. And somehow that's Israel's fault?!
And in past conflicts 20-25% of the Palestinian deaths are from Hamas munitions that fall short. It's unlikely to be that high in this case, but we have things like that first "Israeli" hospital "strike" with "500 dead"--come daylight it's obviously a rocket that blew up at or very soon after ignition. And we have an Al Jazzera "report" "showing" that it was an Israeli weapon--never mind that it didn't actually show the incident at all and that Iron Dome is completely incapable of shooting down a rocket that's taking off. Missiles take time to get there, you can't hit a rocket that has been in the air less than the flight time of a missile reaching it.
I don't even understand what you are trying to tell me here. You are constructing a sourceless story that after the Israeli Army dropped a small bomb on a house ( "roof knocker" is a euphemism) Hamas ordered some civilians to go on top of the roof.
Hamas did this, in your telling, because they knew that the first small bomb, was the precursor to a large second bomb designed to explode the whole building.
What would be the military objective here? Hamas knows that human shields do not stop the Israeli army. So it was not to stop the Israeli army from blowing up the building.
Even worse, your logic is not even that Hamas ordered the civilians to go up on the roof not because they thought it would prevent the Israeli army from blowing up the house, you write
> Hamas deliberately gets people killed.
that means you think that Hamas sent these people on the roof to let the Israeli army execute them, not even to use them as a human shield.
That is such a confused story.
Can you explain what you are talking about ?
What probably really happened is that Israel did a double tap: attack once, wait for people to rush back to tend to the injured, attack them again.
While atrocious, there is at least a military tactic behind this.
Your story about Hamas sending people on a roof in order for them to be killed has no sense to it and it seems it's only purpose is to dehumanize Palestinians.
But maybe I am off here. Please explain what you were trying to tell me again.
Roof knocking is using non explosive ordinance. It is, by definition, not a bomb. Attacking its use is wild, its a tactic that saves civilian lives, even if you disagree with the validity of the target.
> that means you think that Hamas sent these people on the roof to let the Israeli army execute them, not even to use them as a human shield.
Yes. That is what human shielding is. The unfortunate reality is that it is irresponsible to completely stop attacks when human shielding is used, as it encourages further use of the practice. Just like blaming Israel for all of those death is also encouraging Hamas to further use the tactic.
> What would be the military objective here?
Hamas has been very clear that deaths of their civilians further the Palestinian cause by causing the world to turn on Israel. The objective here is clear.
Now I turn it back to you: what is the military purpose of roof knocking?
No double tapping doesn't make sense here. You wouldn't use a non-explosive ordinance if the goal was "double tapping"
> What if, yosamino, your knowledge of the euphemism of knocking on a roof is outdated and this km3r is right? you should probably double check so that in case they are right, you are not having a stupid argument but one backed by facts.
And then I found this hilarious quote:
> As women and children lived in the house, a Hellfire missile was initially shot at the roof as a warning.
referring to American slaughter in Mosul, but still relevant.
The more relevant description is in this article
> The US has adopted a controversial air strike technique known as "roof-knocking", which is best known for its use by Israeli forces during conflicts in Gaza.
> The tactic involves detonating a small explosive above the roof a target as a way of signalling to nearby civilians to get out of range.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/27/us-adopts-contro...
Which tracks a lot better with the descriptions of the practice I have heard from people who experienced it.
So while this is from 2016 and by that metric is 10 years old, you'd have to please show me some information about the army of the state of Israel downgrading their tactics from sending as small bomb to sending a ... what are you claiming they are dropping? a rock ?
https://www.idf.il/en/mini-sites/hamas/how-is-the-idf-minimi...
Non lethal not non explosive, I stand corrected. Now can you answer the question.
You even admit it's a smaller bomb than then say its double tapping? Those are two opposing things.
As shablulman's inexplicably dead post says, this is very impressive work analyzing this unquestionable war crime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47141443
Seems like interesting tech.
Not relevant only for those that have lost theirs.
Nice try Zionist drone.
Eyewitness accounts may be dismissed for any number of biases by the motivated reasoner, but echoes are echoes.
> The Israeli military was forced to change its story about the ambush several times, following the discovery of the bodies in a mass grave, along with their flattened vehicles, and the emergence of video and audio recordings taken by the aid workers. An internal military inquiry ultimately did not recommend any criminal action against the army units responsible for the incident.
Unfortunately, the takeaway here will be "be better at destroying the evidence". The video is quite damning against their initial claims; it includes an uninterrupted view of their arrival, in marked emergency vehicles with lights on and uniformed personnel, and the gunfire beginning: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/04/world/middleeast/gaza-isr...
A good test of whether claim like this is true is to swap out the actor and put in "the Jews"
Like this:
> The Jews murdering their own citizens again
Suddenly it sounds like an antisemitic conspiracy theory.
And the reason why that works, is that antisemitism has nothing to do with Jews, for stupid reasons they just ended up as the victim of it.
What it does do, is expose antisemitic thinking, which is, in the end, really just concentrated anti-human thinking.
So if I was you, I would start examining how I construct argument and critically evaluate information I come across.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html